is the wide spaces, the night silences, or the summer drought and midday zinc-coloured sky of Alentejo. The shepherdess with her distaff, the village crier, the small proprietor, the harvesters with their week’s provision of coarse bread, goat’s cheese, and olives, toiling in a temperature of 122 degrees, appear in his stories. His art is wholly external. One need not have complained of his lack of psychology had he been able to express what he saw in good Portuguese prose. But if we turn to his style we find uncouth constructions, the constant use of French words, and worse still, French words disguised as Portuguese: _deboche_, _coquettemente_, _crayonar_. This is the more pity because, had he written in Portuguese, he might have left robust pictures of the Alentejan peasant’s life in its grim reality which would have been read with pleasure. A sober and fastidious style, sometimes recalling that of the Spanish essayist Azorín, marks the _Contos_ (1900) of the dramatist D. João da Camara. The clear etching of the blind man and his grandson going through the streets on Christmas Eve in _As Estrellas do Cego_ and, especially, the poignant sketch of the ruined old scholar _fidalgo_ in _O Paquete_ show admirably what a skilful craftsman can make of the slightest of themes. This is true to an even greater degree of the best of all the Portuguese _contistas_, JOSÉ FRANCISCO DE TRINDADE COELHO (1861-1908). His _contos_ collected under the title _Os Meus Amores_ (1891), natural and deeply felt scenes of peasant life, are all marked by an exceptional delicacy of style and by a most alluring freshness and simplicity. The tinkling of the bells of flocks, the thin blue smoke above the roofs, the evening mists, the flight of doves are in these pages. And the peasants are treated with the same sympathetic insight as their surroundings, the women singing at their work in the fields, the olive-gatherers at supper in the great farm kitchen; vintage and harvest, tragedy and idyll. The sympathy is extended to the animals, donkey (_Sultão_), goat (_Mãe_), and hen (_A Choca_). The _saudade_ of peasant soldiers for the land in _Terra-Mater_ gives an opportunity for describing the life of the peasants with its hardy toil and many simple pleasures. In _Á Lareira_, the longest of these stories, a rustic _serão_ of peasants _ao borralho_ is pleasantly drawn out with quatrains, riddles, anecdotes, fairy-tales, only interrupted by the ringing of the angelus for the saying of prayer on prayer. Two little masterpieces stand somewhat apart from the rest: _Abyssus Abyssum_, the tragic story of two small boys, brothers, rowing to overtake the evening star, and _Idyllio Rustico_, which with its two ingenuous little shepherds and their flocks of sheep in the lonely places might almost be a chapter from Don Ramón María del Valle Inclán’s _Flor de Santidad_ (1904). _Os Meus Amores_ shows realism at its best, that is to say, hand in hand with idealism.