FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE 287 
four patacos (twenty cents) a month, or five 
cents a week. She had, she said, a little place 
in the chimney to sleep in, and when they had 
too large a fire, she went out of doors. 
Steeped in this utter poverty, — dwelling in 
low, dark, smoky huts, with earthen floors, — it 
is yet wonderful to see how these people pre- 
serve not merely the decencies, but even the 
amenities of life. Their clothes are a chaos of 
patches, but one sees no rags; all their well- 
worn white garments are white in the superla- 
tive degree; and when their scanty supply of 
water is at the scantiest, every bare foot on the 
island is sure to be washed in warm water at 
night. Certainly there are fleas.and there are 
filthinesses in some directions; and yet it is 
amazing, especially for one accustomed to the 
Trish, to see an extreme of poverty so much 
greater, with such an utter absence of squalid- 
ness. But when all this is said and done, the 
position of the people of Fayal is an abject one, 
that is, it is a European position; it teaches 
more of history in a day to an untravelled 
American than all his studies had told him be- 
sides, — and he returns home ready to acquiesce 
in a thousand dissatisfactions, in view of that 
most wondrous of all recorded social changes, 
the transformation of the European peasant 
into the American citizen. 
