picturesqueness of the Church to the real and unconscious
picturesqueness of every day. It is the orange-season, and beneath us
streams an endless procession of men, women, and children, each bearing
on the head a great graceful basket of yellow treasures. Opposite our
window there is a wall by which they rest themselves, after their
three-mile walk from the gardens. There they lounge and there they
chatter. Little boys come slyly to pilfer oranges, and are pelted away
with other oranges; for a single orange has here no more appreciable
value than a single apple in our farmers' orchards; and, indeed,
windfall oranges are left to decay, like windfall apples. During
this season one sees oranges everywhere, even displayed as a sort of
thank-offering on the humble altars of country-churches; the children's
lips and cheeks assume a chronic yellowness; and the narrow side-walks
are strewn with bits of peel, punched through and through by the boys'
pop-guns, as our boys punch slices of potato.

All this procession files down, the whole day long, to the orange-yards
by the quay. There one finds another merry group, or a series of groups,
receiving and sorting the fragrant loads, papering, packing, boxing. In
the gardens there seems no end to the varieties of the golden fruit,
although only one or two are here being packed. There are shaddocks,
_zamboas,_ limes, sour lemons, sweet lemons, oranges proper, and
_Tangerinas_; these last being delicate, perfumed, thin-skinned,
miniature-fruit from the land of the Moors. One may begin to eat oranges
at Fayal in November; but no discriminating person eats a whole orange
before March,--a few slices from the sunny side, and the rest is thrown
upon the ground. One learns to reverse the ordinary principles of
selection also, and choose the smaller and darker before the large and
yellow: the very finest in appearance being thrown aside by the packers
as worthless. Of these packers the Messrs. Dabney employ two hundred,