Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PORTUGUESE DAYS To Major Carlos de Albuquerque de Santa Rosa y Ovar As I was in dress uniform, the whole population followed us. First the little girls, carrying the little boys — for in your country, too, the sisters are somewhat older than their little brothers — in deep baskets on their heads. In Maureria, the girls were naked; in Lapa, where the German Embassy had formerly protested, they had been swathed in figured cotton. Then the beggars, whom one recognized by a copper badge, with the word mendigo engraved upon it. Then the fisher- women of Ovar, with ropes bound about their waists, like your monuments of the time of Manuel; they have eyes on either side of then- faces, so that to see me they had to walk past me instead of following me. The women who sell fuchsias — for one never steals fuchsias in Portugal —deserted their shops for us. And finally came the Belem orphans, in pink smocks striped with carmine, all of whom, in their ignorance of the years which must separate parents and children, certainly wished just now that I were their father. "What do you expect?" you said. "It's the same m Paris when a Portuguese comes to town." They were all barefoot, and walked in their sunshine with less noise than Esquimaux in their snow; when a heel echoed near us, we were aware that some less devoted being was going by. And so it proved: it was either one of those Spaniards who have come to Portugal to spy out how their three rivers end; or the policeman whose duty it was to herald my passing with "Long live war" and "Life to Life"; or else it might be Reigini, the prima donna of the Italian company, who had stifled her neck and wrists in fur against the clasp of her lovers, and reddened her lips and the corners of her eyes with the same stick of rouge. There was, moreov...