The city, on the whole, is decidedly disappointing at close quarters. The straight principal streets and rectangular cross thoroughfares, with their flat, prosaic architecture, the high white houses all alike, are the antipodes of picturesqueness, whilst the authorities seem perversely to have done their utmost to make the river-side as ugly as Rotherhithe or Wapping. This is the more to be regretted, as since I first knew the city many years ago, great tracts of land have been reclaimed from the sludge and ooze of the foreshore which might well have been treated with some regard for public amenity. The large strip reclaimed from the river, however, almost as far as Belem, has for the most part been turned into untidy deserts of dust, shabby-looking docks, and dumping-places for débris. The utter lack of æsthetic taste is observable on all hands. The terrace before the king’s residence, the palace of the Necesidades, for instance, is upon the brow of a low hill, and commands a splendid view of the river and the opposite shore for many miles on either hand; and yet even here, between the palace and the river factory chimneys belch black smoke day and night, hopelessly ugly industrial buildings block the prospect, and the reclaimed foreshore and docks are as desolate as elsewhere. Of the pure picturesque, indeed, little remains in Lisbon; but what still exists must be sought amongst the fisher folk on the river-side, and especially in the markets that have been built on the reclaimed land of the Ribeira Nova, not far from the centre of the city and close to the Hotel Central. It was pleasant to turn into the cool, spacious, covered fish-market out of the brilliant sunlight, which even quite early in the day drove people to welcome shade. The air was clear, crisp, and elastic, and every object seemed to sparkle with light and colour. Inside the market hundreds of people were bargaining quietly, for even here the absence of vociferation was remarkable; servants buying their stocks of provisions for the day, housewives of the humbler class doing their own marketing, baskets on their arms, and women fish hawkers by the score laying in their stocks. They were all shoeless, as usual, wearing under their vast head burden black pork-pie hats over red or yellow kerchiefs, and they have girdles below the hips into which the upper portion of their pleated skirts is drawn to relieve the waist of their weight. Upon the ground, spread around the women sellers, were great heaps of glistening fish; cod, dory, skate, whiting, and large quantities of squids or cuttlefish, which are much liked by the Portuguese poor. [Illustration: ON THE QUAY, LISBON.]