great blue cloak, which requires an outlay of from fifteen to thirty dollars, though the whole remaining wardrobe may not be worth half that.  The poorer classes pay about a dollar a month in rent; they eat fish several times a week and meat twice or thrice a year, living chiefly upon the coarsest corn-bread, with yams and beans.  Still they contrive to have their luxuries.  A soldier’s wife, an elderly woman, said to me pathetically, “We have six vintems (twelve cents) a day,—­my husband smokes and I take snuff,—­and how are we to buy shoes and stockings?” But the most extreme case of economy which I discovered was that of a poor old woman, unable to tell her own age, who boarded with a poor family for four patacos (twenty cents) a month, or five cents a week.  She had, she said, a little place in the chimney to sleep in, and when they had too large a fire, she went out of doors.  Such being the standard of ordinary living, one can compute the terrors of the famine which has since occurred in Fayal, and which has only been relieved through the contributions levied in this country, and the energy of Mr. Dabney.

Steeped in this utter poverty,—­dwelling in low, dark, smoky huts, with earthen floors,—­it is yet wonderful to see how these people preserve not merely the decencies, but even the amenities of life.  Their clothes are a chaos of patches, but one sees no rags; all their well-worn white garments are white in the superlative degree; and when their scanty supply of water is at the scantiest, every bare foot on the island is sure to be washed in warm water at night.  Certainly there are fleas and there are filthinesses in some directions; and yet it is amazing, especially for one accustomed to the Irish, to see an extreme of poverty so much greater, with such an utter absence of squalidness.  But when all this is said and done, the position of the people of Fayal is an abject one, that is, it is a European position; it teaches more of history in a day to an untravelled American than all his studies had told him besides,—­and he returns home ready to acquiesce in a thousand dissatisfactions, in view of that most wondrous of all recorded social changes, the transformation of the European peasant into the American citizen.

Fayal is not an expensive place.  One pays six dollars a week at an excellent hotel, and there is nothing else to spend money on, except beggars and donkeys.  For a shilling an hour one can go to ride, or, as the Portuguese phrase perhaps circuitously expresses it, go to walk on horseback on a donkey,—­dar um passeio a cavallo n’um burro.  The beggars, indeed, are numerous; but one’s expenditures are always happily limited by the great scarcity of small change.  A half-cent, however, will buy you blessings enough for a lifetime, and you can find an investment in almost any direction.  You visit some church or cemetery; you ask a question or two of a lounger in a black cloak, with an air like an