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
conscious enjoyment of it for a single day; and when I reached home and
walked across Boston Common on a June Sunday, I felt as if I were in a
hospital for consumptives.

This condition of health cannot be attributed to any mere advantage of
climate. The higher classes of Fayal are feeble and sickly; their diet
is bad, they take no exercise, and suffer the consequences; they have
all the ills to which flesh is heir, including one specially Portuguese
complaint, known by the odd name of _dor do cotovelo_, elbow-disease,
which corresponds to that known to Anglo-Saxons, by an equally bold
symbol, as the green-eyed monster, Jealousy. So the physical superiority
of the peasantry seems to come solely from their mode of life,--out-door
labor, simple diet, and bare feet. Change these and their health goes;
domestic service in foreign families on the island always makes them
ill, and often destroys their health and bloom forever; and strange
to say, that which most nauseates and deranges their whole physical
condition, in such cases, is the necessity of wearing shoes and
stockings.

The Pico peasants have also the advantage of the Fayalese in
picturesqueness of costume. The men wear homespun blue jackets and blue
or white trousers, with a high woollen cap of red or blue. The women
wear a white waist with a gay kerchief crossed above the bosom, a full
short skirt of blue, red, or white, and a man's jacket of blue, with
tight sleeves. On the head there is the pretty round-topped straw hat
with red and white cord, which is now so extensively imported from
Fayal; and beneath this there is always another kerchief, tied under the
chin, or hanging loosely. The costume is said to vary in every village,
but in the villages opposite Horta this dress is worn by every woman
from grandmother to smallest granddaughter; and w