FAYAL AND THE PORTUGUESE 317 
ing Carnival; saw weddings in churches, with 
groups of male companions holding tall candles 
round kneeling brides; saw the distribution to 
the poor of bread and meat and wine from long 
tables arranged down the principal street, on 
Whitsunday, —a memorial vow, made long 
since, to deprecate the recurrence of an earth- 
quake. But it must be owned that these things, 
so unspeakably interesting at first, became a 
little threadbare before the end of the winter ; 
we grew tired of the tawdriness and shabbiness 
which pervaded them all, of the coarse faces of 
the priests, and the rank odor of the incense. 
We had left Protestantism in a state of ve- 
hement intolerance in America, but we soon 
found, that, to hear the hardest things said 
against the priesthood, one must visit a Roman 
Catholic country. There was no end to the 
anecdotes of avarice and sensuality which were 
told to us, and there seemed everywhere the 
strangest combination of official reverence with 
personal contempt. The principal official, or 
Ouvidor, was known among his parishioners by 
the endearing appellation of “The Black Pig,” 
to which epithet his appearance certainly did 
no discredit. There was a great shipwreck at 
Pico during our stay, and we heard of two hun- 
dred thousand dollars’ worth of rich goods 
stranded on the bare rocks; there were no ade- 
