“Well! if yiz _will_ have the story, I suppose I must tell it:—Maria de Carmo, you see, is a Portuguese name, as _you_ Redmond, and _you_ Tom Pattherson knows well: for it's often you saw the self-same young girl I'm going to tell about; and as purty a crature she was as ever stept in shoe leather,—a beautiful and as sweet a young blossom as the sun ever shone upon, with her black curls, and her white teeth, set just like little rows of harpsichord kays; and her eyes, and her lips, and her ancles! O! she bet all the girls I ever saw in either Spain or Portugal; that you may depend upon. Well, Harry Gainer was her sweetheart; poor fellow! he was my comrade for many a long day. _You_ knew him well, Sargeant.” “I listed the lad mysel at Waterford, aboot this time ten years, as near as poossible; an' a gay callant he was,” said M'Fadgen; and then with an important sigh resumed his pipe. “Well, Harry and I went out with the rigiment from Cork to Lisbon in 1810, and it was in March; for we spent our Patrick's Day aboord, and drowned our shamrock in a canteen of ration rum, just as we were laving sight o' Ireland: and we gave the counthry three cheers on the forecastle—the whole lot of us together, sailors an' all, as the green hills turned blue, an' began to sink away from our sight. We had a fine passage, an' landed at a place called the Black Horse Square, in Lisbon, afther only six days' sailing, as hot and as fine a day, although in March, as one of our July days here. Well—to make a long story short, we made no delay, but, according to ordthers, were embarked aboord the boats, and sailed up the Tagus to Villa Franca (as pretty a river as ever I sailed in), and then the rigiment marched on to Abrantes, where we halted: it was in this town that Harry first met with Maria de Carmo. Both he and I were quarthered at her father's house, a nice counthry sort of place, what the Portuguese call a _Quinta_, in the middle of a thick wood of olives, on the side o' the high hill of Abrantes. You could see from the door fifty miles and more, over beautiful blue mountains on one side; an' on the other side, across the Tagus, a fertile, cultivated counthry, with the fine wide river itself, like a looking-glass, wandering away—God knows where. O, it was as purty a spot as any in Ireland, I'm sure, barrin' the town itself; and that was a dirty, narrow hole of a place, on the very top o' the high hill,—yet it was fortified all round, as if it was worth living in. The streets are so narrow that you could shake hands out o' the windows with the opposite neighbours. There's a bit of a square, to be sure, or Praça, as they call it, but that's not worth mentioning. The fact is, I often thought that the town of Abrantes was like a big dunghill in the middle o' Paradise.