We found or fancied other Orientalisms.  A visitor claps his hands at the head of the court-yard stairs, to summon an attendant.  The solid chimneys, with windows in them, are precisely those described by Urquhart in his delightful “Pillars of Hercules”; so are the gardens, divided into clean separate cells by tall hedges of cane; so is the game of ball played by the boys in the street, under the self-same Moorish name of arri; so is the mode of making butter, by tying up the cream in a goat-skin and kicking it till the butter comes.  Even the architecture fused into one all our notions of Gothic and of Moorish, and gave great plausibility to Urquhart’s ingenious argument for the latter as the true original.  And it is a singular fact that the Mohammedan phrase Oxald, “Would to Allah,” is still the most familiar ejaculation in the Portuguese language and the habitual equivalent in their religious books for “Would to God.”

We were treated with great courtesy and hospitality by our Portuguese neighbors, and an evening party in Fayal is in some respects worth describing.  As one enters, the anteroom is crowded with gentlemen, and the chief reception-room seems like a large omnibus, lighted, dressed with flowers, and having a row of ladies on each side.  The personal beauty is perhaps less than one expects, though one sees some superb dark eyes and blue-black hair; they dress with a view to the latest French fashions, and sometimes rather a distant view.  At last a lady takes her seat at the piano, then comes an eager rush of gentlemen into the room, and partners are taken for cotillons,—­large, double, very double cotillons, here called contradancas.  The gentlemen appear in scrupulous black broadcloth and satin and white kid; in summer alone they are permitted to wear white trousers to parties; and we heard of one anxious youth who, about the turn of the season, wore the black and carried the white in his pocket, peeping through the door, on arrival, to see which had the majority.  It seemed a pity to waste such gifts of discretion on a monarchical country, when he might have emigrated to America and applied them to politics.

The company perform their dancing with the accustomed air of civilized festivity, “as if they were hired to do it, and were doubtful about being paid.”  Changes of figure are announced by a clapping of hands from one of the gentlemen, and a chorus of such applauses marks the end of the dance.  Then they promenade slowly round the room, once or twice, in pairs; then the ladies take their seats, and instantly each gentleman walks hurriedly into the anteroom, and for ten minutes there is as absolute a separation of the sexes as in a Friends’ Meeting.  Nobody approves of this arrangement, in the abstract; it is all very well, they think, for gentlemen, if foreigners, to remain in the room, but it is not the Portuguese custom.  Yet, with this exception, the manners are agreeably