and the fine gardens all vanish, not into _thin_ air, but into the most infernal pestiferous atmosphere that ever unfortunate traveller was compelled to inhale. Here is a hideous change from what the first view led you to expect. It is, indeed, “love at first sight.” You are scarcely established in the first street, when you behold a group of wretches occupied in picking vermin from each other; while, sitting beside them, cross-legged, holding a distaff and spindle in her left hand, and fanning her _fogareioro_ with her right, is a woman who sells chestnuts to any one whose stomach is strong enough to commence the process of mastication in so filthy a neighbourhood. The appearance of everything in Lisbon is so novel to an Englishman, that he is at a loss what most to fix his attention upon. But the number of beggars and the packs of half-famished dogs which infest the streets are in themselves sufficient to afford food for the mind, if not for either the beggars or the dogs. The latter crowd the streets after nightfall and voraciously devour the filth which is indiscriminately thrown from the different windows, and it is a dangerous service to encounter a pack of those famished creatures. In every country there are customs known, Which they preserve exclusively their own; The Portuguese, by some odd whim infected, Have Cloacina’s temple quite rejected. The French general, Junot, whatever his other faults might be, did a good thing in ridding Lisbon of this nuisance. On the fourth day after his arrival he ordered all dogs found in the streets after nightfall to be shot; and the proprietor of every door before which was found any dirt, after a certain hour in the morning, he caused to pay a fine according to the quantity found in front of his premises. But Junot had been too long driven from Lisbon to have his orders respected at the period I write of, and we were in consequence subjected to the annoyance of being poisoned by the accumulated filth, or to the danger of being devoured by the herds of dogs who seemed to consider these windfalls as their particular perquisite.