to
connect the higher parts of the town with its busy centre.

It is not uninteresting to notice in how many small matters Portugal now
differs from Spain. Portugal drinks tea, Spain chocolate or coffee; it
lunches and dines early, Spain very late; its beds and pillows are very
hard, in Spain they are much softer. Travelling too in Portugal is much
pleasanter; as the country is so much smaller, trains leave at much more
reasonable hours, run more frequently, and go more quickly. The inns
also, even in small places, are, if not luxurious, usually quite clean
with good food, and the landlord treats his guests with something more
pleasing than that lofty condescension which is so noticeable in Spain.

Of the more distant countries of Europe, Portugal is now one of the
easiest to reach. Forty-eight hours from Southampton in a boat bound for
South America lands the traveller at Vigo, or three days at Lisbon,
where the brilliant sun and blue sky, the judas-trees in the Avenida,
the roses, the palms, and the sheets of bougainvillia, are such an
unimaginable change from the cold March winds and pinched buds of
England.

There is perhaps no country in Europe which has so interesting a flora,
especially in spring. In March in the granite north the ground under the
pine-trees is covered with the exquisite flowers of the narcissus
triandrus,[4] while the wet water meadows are yellow with petticoat
daffodils. Other daffodils too abound, but these are the commonest.

Later the granite rocks are hidden by great trees of white broom, while
from north to south every wild piece of land is starred with the
brilliant blue flowers of the lithospermum. There are also endless
varieties of cistus, from the small yellow annual with rich brown heart
to the large gum cistus that covers so much of the poor soil in the
Alemtejo. These plains of the Alemtejo are supposed to be the least
beautiful part of the country, but no one can cross them in April
without being almost overcome with the beauty of the flowers, cistus,
white, yellow, or red, tall white heaths, red heaths, blue lithospermum,
yellow whin, and most brilliant of all the large pimpernel, whose blue
flowers almost surpass the gentian. A little further on where there is
less heath and cistus, tall yellow and blue Spanish irises stand up out
of the grass, or there may be great heads of blue scilla peruviana or
sheets of small iris of the brightest blue.

Indeed, sheets of brilliant c