was what we
professedly went up or half up, or one-tenth or-hundredth up, the
mountain for. Un-professedly we went up in order to come down by the
toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to attempt
anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch,
we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people
at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness
from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a
facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly
Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were at
prayer within; irregular files of them attended our progress to give us
the opportunity of doing charity. The beggars were of every sort, sex,
and age, and some, from the hands they held out, with fingers reduced to
their last joints, looked as if they might be lepers, but I do not say
they were. What I am sure of is that the faces of the worshippers--men,
women, and children--when they came out of the church were of a
gentleness which, if it was not innocence and goodness, might well have
passed for those virtues. They had kind eyes, which seemed as often blue
as black, and if they had no great beauty they were seldom quite ugly. I
wish I could think we strangers, as they gazed curiously, timorously at
us, struck them as favorably.

An involuntary ferocity from the famine which we began to feel may have
glared from our visages, for we had eaten nothing for three hours, which
was long for saloon passengers. At the first restaurant which we found,
and in which we all but sat down at table, our coupons were not good,
but this was not wholly loss, for we recouped ourselves in the beauties
of the walk on which we wandered along the mountain-side to the right of
the restaurant. At the point where we were no longer confident of our
way an opportune native appeared and Jed us over paths paved with fine
pebbles, sometimes wrought into geometric patterns, and always through
pleasing sun and shade, till we reached a pretty hotel set, with its
gardens before it, on a shelf of level land and commanding a view of our
steamer and the surrounding sea. Tropic growths, which I will venture to
call myrtle, oleander, laurel, and eucalyptus, environed the hotel, not
too closely nor densely, and our increasing party was presently
discovered from the head of its steps by a hospitable matron, who with a
cry of compre