The islands belong to Portugal, and everything in Fayal has Portuguese characteristics about it.  But more of that anon.  A swarm of swarthy, noisy, lying, shoulder-shrugging, gesticulating Portuguese boatmen, with brass rings in their ears and fraud in their hearts, climbed the ship’s sides, and various parties of us contracted with them to take us ashore at so much a head, silver coin of any country.  We landed under the walls of a little fort, armed with batteries of twelve-and-thirty-two-pounders, which Horta considered a most formidable institution, but if we were ever to get after it with one of our turreted monitors, they would have to move it out in the country if they wanted it where they could go and find it again when they needed it.  The group on the pier was a rusty one—­men and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession beggars.  They trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid of them.  We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these vermin surrounded us on all sides and glared upon us; and every moment excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good look back, just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on his advertising trip from street to street.  It was very flattering to me to be part of the material for such a sensation.  Here and there in the doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on.  This hood is of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a marvel of ugliness.  It stands up high and spreads far abroad, and is unfathomably deep.  It fits like a circus tent, and a woman’s head is hidden away in it like the man’s who prompts the singers from his tin shed in the stage of an opera.  There is no particle of trimming about this monstrous capote, as they call it—­it is just a plain, ugly dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can’t go within eight points of the wind with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.  The general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.

The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious.  It takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and all financial estimates are made in reis.  We did not know this until after we had found it out through Blucher.  Blucher said he was so happy and so grateful to be on solid land once more that he wanted to give a feast—­said he had heard it was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand banquet.  He invited nine of us, and we ate an excellent dinner at the principal hotel.  In the midst of the jollity produced by good cigars, good wine, and passable anecdotes, the landlord presented his bill.  Blucher glanced at it and his countenance fell.  He took another look to assure himself that his senses had not deceived him and then read the items aloud, in a faltering voice, while the roses in his cheeks turned to ashes: