The Portuguese can be industrious, but all work and no play is a scheme of life which would ill accord with his social, pleasure-loving temperament. With a wisdom rare in his day and generation, and an energy unparalleled among Southern races, he manages to combine the two. After rising at dawn and working from twelve to fifteen hours, he does not sit down and fall asleep, but slings a guitar over his shoulder and is off to the nearest threshing-floor to dance a _bolero_. His dancing is not the more graceful for coming after hours of field-labor, but it lacks neither activity nor picturesqueness: above all, it is the outcome of light-heartedness and enjoyment in capering. The night air, soft yet cool, is refreshing after the intense heat of the day: the too sudden lowering of temperature at sundown which makes the evenings unhealthy in many Southern countries is not experienced in Portugal. Every peasant has his guitar, for a love of music is widely diffused, and some of them not only sing but improvise. In the province of the Minho it is not uncommon at these gatherings for a match of improvisation to be held between two rustic bards. One takes his guitar, and in a slow, drawling recitative sings a simple quatrain, which the other at once caps with a second in rhyme and rhythm matching the first. Verse follows verse in steady succession, and the singer who hesitates is lost: his rival rushes in with a tide of rhyme which carries all before it. In such primitive pleasures the shepherds of the Virgilian eclogue indulged. As the life of the peasant, so is that of his wife or sweetheart. She shares in the work, guiding the oxen, cutting grass, even working on the road with hoe and basket. "Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound." Like Wordsworth's reaper, she sings as she works, and the day's labor over is ready to join in the bolero. On fete-days she is arrayed in all the magnificence of her peasant ornaments, worth, if her family is well-to-do, a hundred dollars or more--gold pendants in her ears, large gold chains of some antique Moorish design falling in a triple row over her gay bodice. The men wear long hooded cloaks of brown homespun, which they sometimes retain for convenience after the rest of the peasant-dress has been thrown aside for the regulation coat and trousers. There is no tendency to eccentricity in the national costume of Portugal, but the Portuguese colony of Madeira have invented a singular head-gear in a tiny skull-cap surmounted by a steeple of tightly-wound cloth, which serves as a handle to lift it by. Like the German student's cap, it requires practice to make it adhere at the required angle. This is a bit of coxcombry which has no match in the simple, unaffected vanity of the Portuguese. [Illustration: COUNTRY-HOUSE IN PORTUGAL.]