“Look at the foolish fellow,” quoth the captain, “carrying his plough to the field on his shoulder!”

“Sir,” said the Portuguese, coolly, “I have no other way to take it there.”

The American reserved his fire, thereafter, for bipeds with wings.

These Americanized sailors form a sort of humbler aristocracy in Fayal, and are apt to pride themselves on their superior knowledge of the world, though their sober habits have commonly saved them from the demoralization of a sailor’s life.  But the untravelled Fayalese peasantry are a very gentle, affectionate, childlike people, pensive rather than gay, industrious, but not ingenious, with few amusements and those the simplest, incapable of great crimes or very heroic virtues, educated by their religion up to the point of reverent obedience, but no higher.

Their grace and beauty are like our impressions of the Italian peasantry, and probably superior to the reality in that case.  Among the young men and boys, especially, one sees the true olive cheeks and magnificent black eyes of Southern races.  The women of Fayal are not considered remarkable for beauty, but in the villages of Pico one sees in the doorways of hovels complexions like rose-petals, and faces such as one attributes to Evangeline, soft, shy, and innocent.  But the figure is the chief wonder, the figure of woman as she was meant to be, beautiful in superb vigor,—­not diseased and tottering, as with us, but erect and strong and stately; every muscle fresh and alive, from the crown of the steady head, to the sole of the emancipated foot,—­and yet not heavy and clumsy, as one fancies barefooted women must be, but inheriting symmetry and grace from the Portuguese or Moorish blood.  I have looked through the crowded halls of Saratoga in vain for one such figure as I have again and again seen descending those steep mountain-paths with a bundle of firewood on the head, or ascending them with a basket of farm-manure.  No person who has never left America can appreciate the sensation of living among healthy women; often as I heard of this, I was utterly unprepared for the realization; I never lost the conscious enjoyment of it for a single day; and when I reached home and walked across Boston Common on a June Sunday, I felt as if I were in a hospital for consumptives.

This condition of health cannot be attributed to any mere advantage of climate.  The higher classes of Fayal are feeble and sickly; their diet is bad, they take no exercise, and suffer the consequences; they have all the ills to which flesh is heir, including one specially Portuguese complaint, known by the odd name of dor do cotovelo, elbow-disease, which corresponds to that known to Anglo-Saxons, by an equally bold symbol, as the green-eyed monster, Jealousy.  So the physical superiority of the peasantry seems to come solely from their mode of life,—­out-door labor, simple diet, and bare feet.  Change these and their health goes; domestic service in foreign families on the island always makes them ill, and often destroys their health and bloom forever; and strange to say, that which most nauseates and deranges their whole physical condition, in such cases, is the necessity of wearing shoes and stockings.