Still watching from our hotel-window, turn now from the sham picturesqueness of the Church to the real and unconscious picturesqueness of every day.  It is the orange-season, and beneath us streams an endless procession of men, women, and children, each bearing on the head a great graceful basket of yellow treasures.  Opposite our window there is a wall by which they rest themselves, after their three-mile walk from the gardens.  There they lounge and there they chatter.  Little boys come slyly to pilfer oranges, and are pelted away with other oranges; for a single orange has here no more appreciable value than a single apple in our farmers’ orchards; and, indeed, windfall oranges are left to decay, like windfall apples.  During this season one sees oranges everywhere, even displayed as a sort of thank-offering on the humble altars of country-churches; the children’s lips and cheeks assume a chronic yellowness; and the narrow side-walks are strewn with bits of peel, punched through and through by the boys’ pop-guns, as our boys punch slices of potato.

All this procession files down, the whole day long, to the orange-yards by the quay.  There one finds another merry group, or a series of groups, receiving and sorting the fragrant loads, papering, packing, boxing.  In the gardens there seems no end to the varieties of the golden fruit, although only one or two are here being packed.  There are shaddocks, zamboas, limes, sour lemons, sweet lemons, oranges proper, and Tangerinas; these last being delicate, perfumed, thin-skinned, miniature-fruit from the land of the Moors.  One may begin to eat oranges at Fayal in November; but no discriminating person eats a whole orange before March,—­a few slices from the sunny side, and the rest is thrown upon the ground.  One learns to reverse the ordinary principles of selection also, and choose the smaller and darker before the large and yellow:  the very finest in appearance being thrown aside by the packers as worthless.  Of these packers the Messrs. Dabney employ two hundred, and five hundred beside in the transportation.  One knows at a glance whether the cargo is destined for America or England:  the English boxes having the thin wooden top bent into a sort of dome, almost doubling the solid contents of the box.  This is to evade the duty, the custom-house measurement being taken only at the corners.  It also enables the London dealers to remove some two hundred oranges from every box, and still send it into the country as full.—­When one thinks what a knowing race we came from, it is really wonderful where we Yankees picked up our honesty.