These Americanized sailors form a sort of humbler aristocracy in Fayal,
and are apt to pride themselves on their superior knowledge of the
world, though their sober habits have commonly saved them from the
demoralization of a sailor's life. But the untravelled Fayalese
peasantry are a very gentle, affectionate, childlike people, pensive
rather than gay, industrious, but not ingenious, with few amusements and
those the simplest, incapable of great crimes or very heroic virtues,
educated by their religion up to the point of reverent obedience, but no
higher.

Their grace and beauty are like our impressions of the Italian
peasantry, and probably superior to the reality in that case. Among
the young men and boys, especially, one sees the true olive cheeks and
magnificent black eyes of Southern races. The women of Fayal are not
considered remarkable for beauty, but in the villages of Pico one sees
in the doorways of hovels complexions like rose-petals, and faces such
as one attributes to Evangeline, soft, shy, and innocent. But the
figure is the chief wonder, the figure of woman as she was meant to be,
beautiful in superb vigor,--not diseased and tottering, as with us, but
erect and strong and stately; every muscle fresh and alive, from the
crown of the steady head, to the sole of the emancipated foot,--and
yet not heavy and clumsy, as one fancies barefooted women must be, but
inheriting symmetry and grace from the Portuguese or Moorish blood. I
have looked through the crowded halls of Saratoga in vain for one
such figure as I have again and again seen descending those steep
mountain-paths with a bundle of firewood on the head, or ascending them
with a basket of farm-manure. No person who has never left America can
appreciate the sensation of living among healthy women; often as I heard
of this, I was utterly unprepared for the realization; I never lost the