the spread eagle within me flapped his pinions.  Then I asked myself, “What if the woman were black?” and the eagle immediately closed his wings, and flapped no more.  But I may add, that afterwards, attending dances among the peasants, I was surprised to see my graceful swains in humble life smoking and spitting in the presence of white-robed belles, in a manner not to be witnessed on our farthest western borders.

The position of woman in Portuguese countries brings one nearer to that Oriental type from which modern society has been gradually diverging.  Woman is secluded, so far as each family can afford it, which is the key to the Oriental system.  Seclusion is aristocracy, and if it cannot be made complete, the household must do the best they can.  Thus, in the lowest classes, one daughter is often decreed by the parents to be brought up like a lady, and for this every sacrifice is to be made.  Her robust sisters go bare-footed to the wells for water, they go miles unprotected into the lonely mountains; no social ambition, no genteel helplessness for them.  But Mariquinha is taught to read, write, and sew; she is as carefully looked after as if the world wished to steal her; she wears shoes and stockings and an embroidered kerchief and a hooded cloak; and she never steps outside the door alone.  You meet her, pale and demure, plodding along to mass with her mother.  The sisters will marry laborers and fishermen; Mariquinha will marry a small shop-keeper or the mate of a vessel, or else die single.  It is not very pleasant for the poor girl in the mean time; she is neither healthy nor happy; but “let us be genteel or die.”

On festa-days she and her mother draw their hoods so low and their muffling handkerchiefs so high that the costume is as good as a yashmak, and in passing through the streets these one-eyed women seem like an importation from the “Arabian Nights.”  Ladies of higher rank, also, wear the hooded cloak for disguise and greater freedom, and at a fashionable wedding in the cathedral I have seen the jewelled fingers of the uninvited acquaintances gleam from the blue folds of broadcloth.  But very rarely does one see the aristocratic lady in the street in her own French apparel, and never alone.  There must be a male relative, or a servant, or, at the very least, a female companion.  Even the ladies of the American Consul’s family very rarely go out singly,—­not from any fear, for the people are as harmless as birds, but from etiquette.  The first foreign lady who walked habitually alone in the streets was at once christened “The Crazy American.”  A lady must not be escorted home from an evening party by a gentleman, but by a servant with a lantern; and as the streets have no lamps, I never could see the breaking-up of any such entertainment without recalling Retzsch’s quaint pictures of the little German towns, and the burghers plodding home with their lanterns,—­unless, perchance, what a foreign friend of ours called a “sit-down chair” came rattling by, and transferred our associations to Cranford and Mr. Winkle.