pauperism is found in his charities. Every Saturday, rain or shine,
there flocks together from all parts of the island a singular collection
of aged people, lame, halt, and blind, who receive, to the number of two
hundred, a weekly donation of ten cents each, making a thousand dollars
annually, which constitutes but a small part of the benefactions of this
remarkable man, the true father of the island, with twenty-five thousand
grown children to take care of.

Ten cents a week may not seem worth a whole day's journey on foot, but
by the Fayal standard it is amply worth it. The usual rate of wages for
an able-bodied man is sixteen cents a day; and an acquaintance of ours,
who had just got a job on the roads at thirty cents a day, declined a
good opportunity to emigrate to America, on the ground that it was best
to "let well alone." Yet the price of provisions is by no means very
low, and the difference is chiefly in abstinence. But fuel and clothing
cost little, since little is needed,--except that no woman thinks
herself really respectable until she has her great blue cloak, which
requires an outlay of from fifteen to thirty dollars, though the whole
remaining wardrobe may not be worth half that. The poorer classes pay
about a dollar a month in rent; they eat fish several times a week
and meat twice or thrice a year, living chiefly upon the coarsest
corn-bread, with yams and beans. Still they contrive to have their
luxuries. A soldier's wife, an elderly woman, said to me pathetically,
"We have six _vintems_ (twelve cents) a day,--my husband smokes and I
take snuff,--and how _are_ we to buy shoes and stockings?" But the most
extreme case of economy which I discovered was that of a poor old woman,
unable to tell her own age, who boarded with a poor family for four
_patacos_ (twenty cents) a month, or five cents a week. She had, she
said, a little place in the chimney to sleep in, and when they had too
large a fire, she went out of doors. Such being the standard of ordinary
living, one can compute the terrors of the famine which has since
occurred in Fayal, and which has only been relieved through the
contributions levied in this country, and the energy of Mr. Dabney.

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 rag