After this it was high time to take refuge from the sun among the lemon-groves at Cintra. Here, if ever in his life, Southey for a brief season believed that the grasshopper is wiser than the ant; a true Portuguese indolence overpowered him. “I have spent my mornings half naked in a wet room dozing upon the bed, my right hand not daring to touch my left.” Such glorious indolence could only be a brief possession with Southey. More often he would wander by the streams to those spots where purple crocuses carpeted the ground, and there rest and read. Sometimes seated sideways on one of the sure-footed _burros_, with a boy to beat and guide the brute, he would jog lazily on, while Edith, now skilled in “ass-womanship,” would jog along on a brother donkey. Once and again a fog—not unwelcome—came rolling in from the ocean, one huge mass of mist, marching through the valley like a victorious army, approaching, blotting the brightness, but leaving all dank and fresh. And always the evenings were delightful, when fireflies sparkled under the trees, or in July and August, as their light went out, when the grillo began his song. “I eat oranges, figs, and delicious pears—drink Colares wine, a sort of half-way excellence between port and claret—read all I can lay my hands on—dream of poem after poem, and play after play—take a siesta of two hours, and am as happy as if life were but one everlasting today, and that tomorrow was not to be provided for.” But Southey’s second visit to Portugal was, on the whole, no season of repose. A week in the southern climate seemed to have restored him to health, and he assailed folio after folio in his uncle’s library, rising each morning at five, “to lay in bricks for the great Pyramid of my history.” The chronicles, the laws, the poetry of Portugal, were among these bricks. Nor did he slacken in his ardour as a writer of verse. Six books of _Thalaba_ were in his trunk in manuscript when he sailed from Falmouth; the remaining six were of a southern birth. “I am busy,” he says, “in correcting _Thalaba_ for the press.... It is a good job done, and so I have thought of another, and another, and another.” As with _Joan of Arc_, so with this maturer poem the correction was a rehandling which doubled the writer’s work. To draw the pen across six hundred lines did not cost him a pang. At length the manuscript was despatched to his friend Rickman, with instructions to make as good a bargain as he could for the first thousand copies. By _Joan_ and the miscellaneous _Poems_ of 1797, Southey had gained not far from a hundred and fifty pounds; he might fairly expect a hundred guineas for _Thalaba_. It would buy the furniture of his long-expected house. But he was concerned about the prospects of Harry, his younger brother; and now William Taylor wrote that some provincial surgeon of eminence would board and instruct the lad during four or five years for precisely a hundred guineas. “A hundred