But to fully appreciate this natural courtesy, one must visit the humbler Fayalese at home.  You enter a low stone hut, thatched and windowless, and you find the mistress within, a robust, black-eyed, dark-skinned woman, engaged in grinding corn with a Scriptural handmill.  She bars your way with apologies; you must not enter so poor a house; you are so beautiful, so perfect, and she is so poor, she has “nothing but the day and the night,” or some equally poetic phrase.  But you enter and talk with her a little, and she readily shows you all her little possessions,—­her chest on the earthen floor, her one chair and stool, her tallow-candle stuck against the wall, her husk mattress rolled together, with the precious blue cloak inside of it.  Behind a curtain of coarse straw-work is a sort of small boudoir, holding things more private, an old barrel with the winter’s fuel in it, a few ears of corn hanging against the wall, a pair of shoes, and a shelf with a large pasteboard box.  The box she opens triumphantly and exhibits her santinhos, or little images of saints.  This is San Antonio, and this is Nossa Senhora do Conceicao, Our Lady of the Conception.  She prays to them every day for sunshine; but they do not seem to hear, this winter, and it rains all the time.  Then, approaching the climax of her blessedness, with beaming face she opens a door in the wall, and shows you her pig.

The courtesy of the higher classes tends to formalism, and has stamped itself on the language in some very odd ways.  The tendency common to all tongues, towards a disuse of the second person singular, as too blunt and familiar, is carried so far in Spanish and Portuguese as to disuse the second person plural also, except in the family circle, and to substitute the indirect phrases, vuestra Merced (in Spanish) and vossa Merce (in Portuguese), both much contracted in speaking and familiar writing, and both signifying “your Grace.”  The joke of invariably applying this epithet to one’s valet would seem sufficiently grotesque in either language, and here the Spanish stops; but Portuguese propriety has gone so far that even this phrase has become too hackneyed to be civil.  In talking with your equals, it would be held an insult to call them simply “your Grace”; it must be some phrase still more courtly,—­vossa Excellencia, or vossa Senhoria.—­One may hear an elderly gentleman talking to a young girl of fourteen, or, better still, two such damsels talking together, and it is “your Excellency” at every sentence; and the prescribed address on an envelope is "Illustrissima Excellentissima Senhora Dona Maria.”  The lower classes have not quite reached the “Excellency,” but have got beyond the “Grace,” and hence the personal pronouns are in a state of colloquial chaos, and the only safe way is to hold to the third person and repeat the name of Manuel or Maria, or whatever it may be, as often as possible.