single. It is not very pleasant for
the poor girl in the mean time; she is neither healthy nor happy; but
"let us be genteel or die."

On _festa_-days she and her mother draw their hoods so low and their
muffling handkerchiefs so high that the costume is as good as a
_yashmak_, and in passing through the streets these one-eyed women seem
like an importation from the "Arabian Nights." Ladies of higher rank,
also, wear the hooded cloak for disguise and greater freedom, and at a
fashionable wedding in the cathedral I have seen the jewelled fingers of
the uninvited acquaintances gleam from the blue folds of broadcloth. But
very rarely does one see the aristocratic lady in the street in her own
French apparel, and never alone. There must be a male relative, or a
servant, or, at the very least, a female companion. Even the ladies of
the American Consul's family very rarely go out singly,--not from any
fear, for the people are as harmless as birds, but from etiquette. The
first foreign lady who walked habitually alone in the streets was at
once christened "The Crazy American." A lady must not be escorted home
from an evening party by a gentleman, but by a servant with a lantern;
and as the streets have no lamps, I never could see the breaking-up of
any such entertainment without recalling Retzsch's quaint pictures of
the little German towns, and the burghers plodding home with their
lanterns,--unless, perchance, what a foreign friend of ours called a
"sit-down chair" came rattling by, and transferred our associations to
Cranford and Mr. Winkle.

We found or fancied other Orientalisms. A visitor claps his hands at
the head of the court-yard stairs, to summon an attendant. The solid
chimneys, with windows in them, are precisely those described by
Urquhart in his delightful "Pillars of Hercules"; so are the gardens,
divided into clean separate cells by tall hedges of cane; so is the game
of ball played by the boys in the street, under the self-same Moorish
name of _arri_; so is the mode of making butter, by tying up the
cream in a goat-skin and kicking it till the butter comes. Even the
architecture fused into one all our notions of Gothic and of Moorish,
and gave great plausibility to Urquhart's ingenious argument for
the latter as the true original. And it is a singular fact that the
Mohammedan phrase _Oxald_, "Would to Allah," is still the most familiar
ejaculation in the Portuguese language and the habitual equivalent in
t