streams, and put ourselves in charge of mine host of Guilletti’s. The next day I landed near the governmental house, where was staying as a guest the invalided empress mother of Brazil, who had, with a broken constitution, gone to Madeira, since to die. I visited the charitable hospital of the place, which fronts on the grand plaza. No sight can be more loathsome than the one to be seen in the wards of a Portuguese hospital, unless it be that of the dead mendicants that you pass in the streets of some of the cities of China. The most terrible ailments that flesh is heir to, and the greatest suffering that “age, ache, and penury, can lay on nature,” were present all around. And then there were others in whom the flame of life, after flickering lowly, had just gone out. I was very willing to get away from the apartment, and after descending to a dimly-lighted chapel below, where a solitary priest was engaged in prayer for the repose of the dead and dying above, and glancing at its characteristic decorations, I left the building. The edifice itself is quite an extended one, though it has no architectural beauty to attract attention. Over its main entrance, cut elaborately in a massive block of stone, are the royal arms of Portugal. My next place of visit was to the local prison, through which I was accompanied by a sergeant. The inmates, who were composed of both sexes, confined for offences of smuggling a bar of soap, up to those of a graver character, are allowed to indulge in any handiwork for which they are competent, and the product of their hands, tied on the ends of poles, is thrust through their prison-windows into the street, of which they solicit the purchase by the passer-by. But not even in the prisons are you exempt from the “_por sua suade_”—the interminable solicitation for alms; and the distance which the prisoner may be from you is no barrier, as he is provided with a small car which, with a pole, he can push to his outer grating, and as quickly withdraw. I can mention a circumstance to show with what little sense of degradation or hesitancy this thing of alms-asking is indulged in by a dago population. I was sitting in front of the consul’s, conversing with some friends, when quite a genteel and tidily-dressed person, rejoicing in a much better pair of patent-leathers than I could muster, approached us and solicited alms, and was quite pertinacious in his request. I had heard of the Spanish beggars on horseback, who solicited aid of pedestrians on the ground that they had more need of assistance than other people because they had to support their beast as well as themselves, but I had never met with anything quite as deliberate until I encountered my patent-leather-shoe friend at Madeira.