The one overwhelming fact of the first day abroad is the simple sensation that one is abroad:  a truth that can never be made anything but commonplace in the telling, or anything but wonderful in the fulfilling.  What Emerson says of the landscape is true here:  no particular foreign country is so remarkable as the necessity of being remarkable under which every foreign country lies.  Horace Walpole found nothing in Europe so astonishing as Calais; and we felt that at every moment the first edge of novelty was being taken off for life, and that, if we were to continue our journey round the world, we never could have that first day’s sensations again.  Yet because no one can spare time to describe it at the moment, this first day has never yet been described; all books of travels begin on the second day; the daguerreotype-machine is not ready till the expression has begun to fade out.  Months had been spent in questioning our travelled friends, sheets of old correspondence had been disinterred, sketches studied, Bullar’s unsatisfactory book read, and now we were on the spot, and it seemed as if every line and letter must have been intended to describe some other place on the earth, and not this strange, picturesque, Portuguese, Semi-Moorish Fayal.

One general truth came over us instantly, and it was strange to think that no one had happened to speak of it before.  The essence of the surprise was this.  We had always been left to suppose that in a foreign country one would immediately begin to look about and observe the foreign things,—­these novel details having of course that groundwork of ordinary human life, the same all the world over.  To our amazement, we found that it was the groundwork itself that was foreign; we were shifted off our feet; not the details, but the basis itself was wholly new and bewildering; and, instead of noting down, like intelligent travellers, the objects which were new, we found ourselves stupidly staring about to find something which was old,—­a square inch of surface anywhere which looked like anything ever seen before,—­that we might take our departure from that, and then begin to improve our minds.  Perhaps this is difficult for the first hours in any foreign country; certainly the untravelled American finds it utterly impossible in Fayal.  Consider the incongruities.  The beach beneath your feet, instead of being white or yellow, is black; the cliffs beside you are white or red, instead of black or gray.  The houses are of white plaster on the outside, with wood-work, often painted in gay stripes, within.  There are no chimneys to the buildings, but sometimes there is a building to the chimney; the latter being a picturesque tower with smoke coming from the top and a house appended to the base.  One half the women go about bareheaded, save a handkerchief, and with a good deal of bareness at the other extremity,—­while the other half wear hoops on their heads in the form of vast conical hoods attached to voluminous cloth