Leaves from a Madeira Garden 



a large business is conducted by an inadequate 

 staff. 



It is easy for a foreigner to be censorious, 

 to be too ready to blame a country he visits 

 for ignoring what his own sets store by. There 

 is another side ; and an Englishman may 

 assuredly learn something here. He will find 

 that all classes, high and low alike, will treat 

 him with a courtesy which he may look for in 

 vain at home ; that life may be agreeable with 

 much less fuss over its machinery than he is 

 accustomed to make ; that if unpleasant things 

 must be done, the art of doing them pleasantly 

 is worth cultivating ; perhaps even — but this 

 is heresy — that the habit of never doing to-day 

 what you can put off till to-morrow has 

 sometimes not only aesthetic but practical 

 advantages. 



A speculative interest is added to the financial 

 side of life here by the fluctuations in the 

 exchange. The unit of Portuguese currency 

 is the m, an imaginary coin of very small value 

 — as I write about 5400 rets are the equivalent 

 of the Eno:lish sovereign. There is a certain 

 convenience in expressing all financial amounts 

 in the terms of such a diminutive unit, for 



12 



