Steeped in this utter poverty,--dwelling in low, dark, smoky huts, with
earthen floors,--it is yet wonderful to see how these people preserve
not merely the decencies, but even the amenities of life. Their clothes
are a chaos of patches, but one sees no rags; all their well-worn white
garments are white in the superlative degree; and when their scanty
supply of water is at the scantiest, every bare foot on the island is
sure to be washed in warm water at night. Certainly there are fleas
and there are filthinesses in some directions; and yet it is amazing,
especially for one accustomed to the Irish, to see an extreme of poverty
so much greater, with such an utter absence of squalidness. But when all
this is said and done, the position of the people of Fayal is an abject
one, that is, it is a _European_ position; it teaches more of history
in a day to an untravelled American than all his studies had told
him besides,--and he returns home ready to acquiesce in a thousand
dissatisfactions, in view of that most wondrous of all recorded social
changes, the transformation of the European peasant into the American
citizen.

Fayal is not an expensive place. One pays six dollars a week at an
excellent hotel, and there is nothing else to spend money on, except
beggars and donkeys. For a shilling an hour one can go to ride, or, as
the Portuguese phrase perhaps circuitously expresses it, go to walk
on horseback on a donkey,--_dar um passeio a cavallo n'um burro_. The
beggars, indeed, are numerous; but one's expenditures are always happily
limited by the great scarcity of small change. A half-cent, however,
will buy you blessings enough for a lifetime, and you can find an
investment in almost any direction. You visit some church or cemetery;
you ask a question or two of a lounger in a black cloak, with an air
like an exiled Stuart, and, as you part, he detains you, saying, "Sir,