party. "I am provoked," said
Lady Mabel, "to find how little progress I have made in speaking
Portuguese. But it is not surprising what a complete mastery the
rudest and most illiterate people here have over their tongue."

"And how polite and sociable they are," said L'Isle. "Unlike the
unmannered and almost languageless English peasant, they are
unembarrassed and social, fluent, and often eloquent."

"Yet these men," said she, "in habits, though not in race, are but
nomadic Tartars at the western extremity of Europe."

"They differ too," said L'Isle, "from their immediate neighbors, the
Spaniard, in being far more sociable and communicative. For instance,
I have got much more out of my Portuguese shepherd than a certain
French traveler got out of his shepherd of Castile."

"What do you allude to?" she asked.

"A French traveler, it is said, as he entered Castile, met a shepherd
guiding his flock. Curious to know all the circumstances which give to
the Spanish wool its inimitable qualities, he asked the shepherd an
hundred questions: 'If his flock belonged to that district? What sort
of food was given it? Whether he was on a journey? From whence he
came? Whither he was going? When he would return?' In short, he asked
every question a prying Frenchman could think of. The shepherd
listened coldly to them all. Then, in the sententious style of a true
Castilian, replied, '_aqui nacen_, _aqui pacen_, _aqui mueren_,' (here
they breed, here they feed, here they die,) and went his way without a
word more."

The party spent some time here, dining and resting under the shade of
these prickly oaks, the tree that yields the famous _botolas_, so
largely used for food by men and swine, and on tasting which we are
less surprised that in "the primal age,"

"Hunger then
Made acorns tasteful; thirst each rivulet
Run nectar."

Mrs. Shortridge had contrived to snatch a short siesta, in spite of
her fears. Their horses were led up, ready for them to mount and
proceed on their journey, when Lady Mabel, plucking a twig from a
branch overhead, observed on it several specimens of the _kermes_. She
could not resist this opportunity of displaying her scraps of
scientific lore, and detained the party while she delivered a
discourse on the _coccus arborum_, "which," she said, "infests this
tree; the _quercus cocci_. This furnishes what the ignorant-learned
long called grains of kermes, looking like dried currants, which