landed under the walls
of a little fort, armed with batteries of twelve-and-thirty-two-pounders,
which Horta considered a most formidable institution, but if we were ever
to get after it with one of our turreted monitors, they would have to
move it out in the country if they wanted it where they could go and find
it again when they needed it. The group on the pier was a rusty one--men
and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and
unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession beggars. They
trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid
of them. We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these
vermin surrounded us on all sides and glared upon us; and every moment
excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good look back,
just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on his
advertising trip from street to street. It was very flattering to me to
be part of the material for such a sensation. Here and there in the
doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on. This hood is
of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a
marvel of ugliness. It stands up high and spreads far abroad, and is
unfathomably deep. It fits like a circus tent, and a woman's head is
hidden away in it like the man's who prompts the singers from his tin
shed in the stage of an opera. There is no particle of trimming about
this monstrous capote, as they call it--it is just a plain, ugly
dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can't go within eight points of the
wind with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.
The general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will
remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its
capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to
tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.

The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious. It
takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and all financial estimates are
made in reis. We did not know this until after we had found it out
through Blucher. Blucher said he was so happy and so grateful to be on
solid land once more that he wanted to give a feast--said he had heard it
was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand banquet. He invited
nine of us, and we ate an excellent dinner at the principal hotel. In
the midst of the jollity produced by go