stone in his career, and that if all the moments could be like that moment he would scorn to receive wages for guarding the palace. He abounds on every side of you for ten paces, and then suddenly, in broken French, informs you that it is forbidden to him to accompany you farther. At his suggestion you ascend another flight of steps and ring a bell. You do ring. No answer. The custodian below grins and makes a furious motion of the arm to indicate that you aren't half ringing. You ring with sternness. He approves. The door is opened by custodian Number Two, while Number One beams upward, as if saying, "Precisely what I said would come to pass has come to pass."

Number Two is thinner-an Indiapaper encyclopedia of the palace. Though not servile, he is a courtier, and, though a courtier, he is very firm. He may be distinguished from all other officials in Portugal by the fact that he is not smoking a cigarette and does not spit-even into a spittoon. The excellent adroit fellow has really nothing to show, but he shows it with grandeur. Except Moorish tiles and a few suits of armor and the chimneys of the tremendous Moorish kitchen (which are in truth the bottle-like constructions dominating the town), there is naught of the slightest esthetic or practical interest in the whole castle. No worse pictures were ever painted than hang on these walls.

There are, however, the private apartments. "Please abandon your cigarette," says Number Two. "I am about to show you the private apartments of the ex-king and queen." A proof, this, of the existence of the historic sense in a republican official. Poor, dark little private apartments! You see how monarchs till quite recently lived in their summer villegiatura, and the revelation is pathetic. The chief of the furniture is protected from you by a cord, in imitation of Fontainebleau. What furniture! What a tasteless, vulgar mixture of styles and no-styles! The desk of the

assassinated Carlos might have been bought at a celebrated second-hand establishment in Kingsway. The leather arm-chair might have come out of a hotel, the plush sofa out of a dubious house. It is terrible, desolating, frightful. It would not be believed on the stage-no, not on the provincial stage. The bedroom, after the other rooms, is comparatively innocuous. The washstand shows modern plumbing, coquettishly finished. Here the queen used to bend with pride over a hot-water tap device invented in England, the same queen who, with a bouquet of flowers her sole weapon, tried to shield her husband from the bullets of a political executioner in Lisbon.

When you get out of the palace the unctuous and jolly Number One runs forth rapidly at you, as you pass, with buttonhole posies. A delicate attention! You must accept them or break his heart. Remunerate him or not as you choose that is a detail-but accept the offering of a brother.

After the palace, nothing in Cintra! An agreeable enough little town, with a real train and two or three tram-cars, and a bookshop (where tobacco maintains the balance of the balance-sheet), but scarcely worthy to be the cynosure of a continent. Byron wrote bits of "Childe Harold" there. You can see the building; it was and is a hotel. The mimosa is perfectly marvelous-mimosa in full blossom meets mimosa across the thoroughfares in winter. No doubt in summer the display of vegetation is prodigious. And what then? As a resort, as a public monument, Cintra must decay. The modern tourist is more aware of relative values than Southey was, or Byron, who compared the town to Eden. The globe is more familiar to him.

A word concerning Pena. Geographically it is only about half a mile from Cintra, but as it is on a crag just a third of a mile high, the hairpin road from town to Pena is probably several miles in length; even so, its gradients are such as effectively to cure the magnificent

horses of their habit of trotting. As you ascend the scenery takes on a more and more panoramic grandeur, and Cintra gets smaller and smaller, and before you are anywhere near the gates of the park you can look down the champagne-bottle chimneys of the summer palace in the middle of the town. The feature of the luxuriant mountain-side is the immense boulders, some of them weighing a hundred tons or so, poised on one another like the transient edifice of a child. The Lisbon earthquake must have put the fear of heaven into those boulders for a few years. The hanging gardens out of which the towers of Pena rise are full of black swans and fountains, and the February climate may be judged from the fallen camellia blossom that lies everywhere.

The great castle is surrounded by a narrow terrace, and the tremendous views from this terrace are in the highest degree sublime. Nothing finer can exist outside Yellowstone Park. If Southey lived on the peak before the Arabian remains were rendered habitable, then he is justified of his words. Byron is not. The affair is overwhelming, but it bears no resemblance to the Edens of the old illustrated family Bibles. Possibly Eden may be located in the Moorish castle which-though from the town it seems almost as lofty as Pena-is now perched far below on a lesser crag. When you enter the modern residence, all is over, for you are in one of the worst royal houses ever seen. True, there are a very few fine things, and especially there is an Italian fifteenth-century alabaster altar (which must have needed some engineering up those slopes); but the ensemble is uglier even than the interior of the palace in the town. The inconveniences, the discomforts, the pettinesses, the obscurities, the monstrosities are simply tragic. Only one room, Queen Amelia's chamber, had a fireplace seemingly transported from. Cromwell Road. Look on the wall at the Christmas card (with an English greeting) hand-painted by King Carlos, and at the

water-colors by the same and by Queen Amelia. Look at the yellowing periodical literature (all dated October, 1910) scattered about-Modern Society ("the mirror of the social world"), Gil Blasand the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Look at the cheaply framed reproductions of old masters, issued at a shilling apiece by William Heinemann. Search in vain for the bathroom.. But every little window frames a celestial view. The prince consort climbed seventeen hundred feet to erect all this formidable masonry into the false semblance of something antique and fine; he employed a colonel as architect; he spent a fortune to produce an abode that any stockbroker would sniff at; he desecrated a unique, miraculous site, and in sixty years of use a royal line failed to make the place better than a congeries of expensive wigwams. The last sound and the first which we heard within the castle was that of an oil-engine. Doubtless it was employed to actuate the dynamo for the "wireless" installation whose wires are now stretched between the towers of the great eyesore. The republic has had the wit to turn to utility a monument which ought not to exist, but which it would be foolish to destroy.

One of the most satisfactory things about Lisbon is that you can enter it from the sea without any passport formalities. Indeed at no Portuguese port had we to show passports or to give any information whatever as to our foreign selves. We might have been emissaries of Lenin carrying the seeds of conspiracy and Bolshevism, for all the Portuguese authorities seemed to care. Travelers in Europe will admit that this is a great point in favor of Portugal.

As for the renowned view of Lisbon from the river, I have seen finer views of cities from the water. It was good but did not induce ecstasy. The view from the highest of the hundred hills upon which Lisbon is built was much more striking than the view from the river.

The city has importance, but exactly how important it is nobody knows. In 1900 it had a population of three hundred and fifty thousand. Just before the war it was supposed to have a population of half a million or more. To-day, such has been the influx from the countryside, the lowest estimate puts the population at three-quarters of a million, and some statisticians with a love of round figures put it at a million. But only the next census will discover the truth. Anyhow, the city has a frontage of seven miles to the Tagus, which is something especially along the Lisbonian streets. The pity is that the most glorious sight in Lisbon-the church and monastery of Belem (the latter now a well-run orphanage) lies at the wrong end of the seven miles. The spectacularly remarkable thing about Lisbon is the fact that, owing to the number and precipitateness of its hills (some of them rise at an angle within a few degrees of the perpendicular), half the buildings appear to be perched on top of the other half. The crest of one hill is reached by an elevator that ends in a short horizontal gallery. To erect this elevator right in the middle of the city was a stroke of genius on the part of the city council. Of course the elevator itself is ugly, but it is well masked by big buildings, and the panorama from the summit at dusk is of a magical beauty. The time to see the romance of Lisbon is after the glare of the sun on the white, pink, and yellow buildings has begun to fade, when the washed clothes that flow down on poles from the windows of every story in the quieter streets have lost their intimate detail in the twilight and become mysterious. And even the most modern white streets of the shopping center look lovely at night in the diffused radiance of arc-lamps often hidden round a corner; they are monumental then, simplified, grandiose, immensely impressive. And "Oriental" Lisbon, ravines of streets, climbing, descending, curving, is as picturesque as any one can desire. The population everywhere intensifies

the picturesqueness, for it is thoroughly mixed, diversified, and tinted in all shades. Every variety of cross from 99 per cent Latin-Moorish and 1 per cent negro, to 99 per cent negro and 1 per cent Latin-Moorish, can be seen; and racial purity of any sort is rare. There is no color prejudice in Portugal; there could not be. You can see the races of the earth in Chicago, if you visit different quarters, but in Lisbon you can see the races of the earth in a single individual. This complexity of breeding appears especially strange in the central square of Lisbon, where newspaperoffices, hotels, restaurants, cafés, stores, picture-theaters, gaming-houses, and a spider's web of electric tram-wires give a physical illusion of unadulterated Western modernity.

Lisbon is as different from Oporto as New York from, say, New Orleans. Not less picturesque, but differently picturesque. One meets few oxen in Lisbon, and the Lisbon oxen have plain yokes and horns less like the antlers of a stag. On the other hand, there is a full and even generous supply of automobiles, and the picturesqueness of these is vocal; it consists in the noise they make and the wind of their rushing. A story runs that a Portuguese profiteer bought a Rolls Royce, and the next day complained that it was not satisfactory. The vendor anxiously interviewed the chauffeur, who said that the car functioned to perfection. But the owner protested:

"Nothing of the kind. It's absolutely noiseless. You can't hear it move."

The vendor soon remedied that defect and made the owner quite happy. When you are trying to sleep, and not succeeding, at the Avenida Palace Hotel, which gives on the famous Avenue of Liberty (a respectable but dull imitation of the Champs Elysées), the row, din, and uproar of the automobiles of Portuguese profiteers develop into a phenomenon surpassing all other phenomena on earth—and it is a phenomenon that persists during twenty-one hours of the twenty-four. Compared to it, Fifth

Avenue is like a side-street in Concord, and Piccadilly like a churchyard. Possibly cross-breeding may account for this excruciating passion for noise and restlessness which to my mind removes Lisbon from quite the van of the procession of progress.

Nevertheless, Lisbon is in the movement. Its picture-theaters are packed, and Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford are adored there. Its huge opera-house, with a hundred private boxes and a shoeshine parlor, attracts considerable audiences to performances that compare not unfavorably with those of Paris. It has libraries. It has national art collections (though the rules for admittance thereto tend to dissuade the visitor from attempting to see them). It has fireengines, which fly toward conflagrations to a warning accompaniment of tin whistles. It has lots of newspapers; it has a theatrical newspaper. It has one or two good restaurants, and one very good indeed but not better than at Oporto. It has strikes. It has many strikes. I should not be surprised to learn that Portugal has more strikes per square mile and per head than any other country in the world. In Oporto the trams had struck. No sooner had we entered the restaurant of our first hotel in Lisbon than we had to assist at a strike in the making. The proceedings were conducted in French. With a magnificent disregard of hungry clients, the waiters crowded round the hated employer who demanded of them with all the arts of rhetoric, "Am I the master here or are you?" If I had been asked to reply, I should have said: "Neither of you. And that's either the curse or the salvation of the situation-I don't know which." Still, the affair tranquilized itself, and we obtained our meal-not a good one. The telephones in Lisbon had been on strike for weeks and weeks. The postal service was so disorganized that enterprising firms would organize their own service when they could. The railways were on the eve of striking. But the Portuguese

have the art of life, which is the attainment of calm and of fatalism.

You could see the art of life in full practice in the sugar-queues, which abounded in the streets as sugar itself abounded in the hotels; you noticed respectably dressed old gentlemen standing placidly in these queues, and still standing there when you passed the same spot two hours later. You could see it in the use of the monocles which the golden youth and middle-age of Portugal deem to be an essential part of their raiment. An official told us that ten thousand monocles of plain glass were imported into Lisbon every year. The same official told us that forty thousand persons were employed in the gambling trade in Portugal; that there were four hundred gambling-houses in Lisbon, and over a hundred within a hundred yards of the Rocio-the central square of the city; and he told us further that, since business men had a habit of gambling till 2 or 3 A.M., it was difficult to make appointments with them before

noon.

We gradually came under the obsession of the great Portuguese gambling idea. We heard again and again that the best food at the cheapest prices and the best dancing and the best diversions generally were to be had in the gamblinghouses of Lisbon. And at length we determined to visit the most chic-of course solely in the interests of social science! We arranged a rendezvous for nine o'clock, because our information was that nobody would dream of dining in a Lisbon gambling-house before ninethirty. As the hour approached we grew positively excited, and we drove up to the door in a fever of anticipation. The door was shut. A small crowd of young quidnuncs said that the place was closed by order. Impossible! Everybody had agreed that the authorities would never dare to shut up the gambling-houses. We tried another one. Closed. Another. Closed. Lastly we went, under guidance, to a mysterious establishment in a dark and dubious

street. Our guide said that the authorities would not succeed in closing that. Closed. Presently we became aware of cavalrymen prancing up and down the thoroughfares in couples. The thing looked like a revolution. But it was only the Portuguese method of closing gambling-houses. The next morning a military sentry stood in front of the door of each of the four hundred gamblinghouses of Lisbon. Naturally we rejoiced as virtuous and hard-working men at the suppression of this terrible vice. Yes, we rejoiced. But somewhere in the recesses of our minds was a notion to the effect that the Portuguese government would have done well to postpone the suppression for just twenty-four hours. We had to leave Portugal without the slightest notion of what kind of a paradise a truly chic Lisbon gambling-house really is. A few days later the English papers talked descriptively of a revolution in Portugal. But we knew what it was and that it wasn't a revolution.

From British inhabitants and frequenters of Portugal we heard various verdicts on the Portuguese. One man said that Portugal was corrupt from top to bottom-from the policeman on the pier to the chief of the state; that the profiteers had taken all the best houses, that the house famine was extremely

acute, that no effort whatever was being made to cure it, and, finally, that the middle-classes were being ground to powder between the millstone of the profiteer and the millstone of the proletariat. Nothing in this indictment struck us as novel. We had heard much the same of other countries that could eat Portugal without too much indigestion. The general verdict was decidedly more favorable. Foreigners who had spent their lives in Portugal spoke well of the Portuguese. They said that they were polite, amenable, and satisfactory to deal with, provided that you could smile pleasantly and refrain from trying to hustle them. To try to hustle them was fatal. They held strongly that Portugal was deserving of the utmost possible sympathetic treatment, seeing that it had gone into the war with expectation of great advantage, and come out of the war with nothing but high prices and debt. And they attributed the relative instability of government not to the capriciousness of the people, but to the absence of permanent officials in the state-machine. Strange to say, terrible to relate, the Portuguese people, unlike more imposing races, are not faultless. Nevertheless we, in our brief acquaintance, took a considerable fancy to them.