“What says he about my language and Nossa Senhora de Nazareth?” said Lady Mabel.  “Tell him that I speak better Portuguese than she ever did, for all her black eyes and tawny skin.”

“By no means,” said L’Isle, smiling.  “As you will have no opportunity to evangelize the man, it will do no good to outrage his idolatrous veneration for Nossa Senhora de Nazareth? You might shake his superstition, yet not purify his faith, but merely drive him to a choice between the church and infidelity.”

They now left the shepherds to join the party.  “I am provoked,” said Lady Mabel, “to find how little progress I have made in speaking Portuguese.  But it is not surprising what a complete mastery the rudest and most illiterate people here have over their tongue.”

“And how polite and sociable they are,” said L’Isle.  “Unlike the unmannered and almost languageless English peasant, they are unembarrassed and social, fluent, and often eloquent.”

“Yet these men,” said she, “in habits, though not in race, are but nomadic Tartars at the western extremity of Europe.”

“They differ too,” said L’Isle, “from their immediate neighbors, the Spaniard, in being far more sociable and communicative.  For instance, I have got much more out of my Portuguese shepherd than a certain French traveler got out of his shepherd of Castile.”

“What do you allude to?” she asked.

“A French traveler, it is said, as he entered Castile, met a shepherd guiding his flock.  Curious to know all the circumstances which give to the Spanish wool its inimitable qualities, he asked the shepherd an hundred questions:  ’If his flock belonged to that district?  What sort of food was given it?  Whether he was on a journey?  From whence he came?  Whither he was going?  When he would return?’ In short, he asked every question a prying Frenchman could think of.  The shepherd listened coldly to them all.  Then, in the sententious style of a true Castilian, replied, ‘aqui nacen, aqui pacen, aqui mueren,’ (here they breed, here they feed, here they die,) and went his way without a word more.”

The party spent some time here, dining and resting under the shade of these prickly oaks, the tree that yields the famous botolas, so largely used for food by men and swine, and on tasting which we are less surprised that in “the primal age,”

             “Hunger then
  Made acorns tasteful; thirst each rivulet
  Run nectar.”

Mrs. Shortridge had contrived to snatch a short siesta, in spite of her fears.  Their horses were led up, ready for them to mount and proceed on their journey, when Lady Mabel, plucking a twig from a branch overhead, observed on it several specimens of the kermes.  She could not resist this opportunity of displaying her scraps of scientific lore, and detained the party while she delivered a discourse on the coccus arborum,