The peasantry live well in their way, and are not content with inferior food. Not for them is the poor makeshift of white bread and the fat cold bacon of the English farm hand. The bread of rye with an admixture of maize flour, the _broa_ or _brona_, as it is called in north-western Spain, is dark in colour and coarse in texture; but it is a fine sustaining food, upon which, in Galicia, I have often made a good meal. The ever-present dried codfish, _bacalhau_, cooked with garlic and oil, and sometimes with rice, flavoured with saffron, is also not by any means a food to be contemned, unpalatable as it is to those who taste it for the first time. But this, although forming the staple fare of the Minho peasant and small farmer, does not exhaust his _menu_. There is for high days and holidays the savoury _estofado_ of stewed meat and vegetables, of which the Portuguese peasant housewife is pardonably proud; there are olives, onions, and fruit _ad libitum_, and good, sound, new wine, tart, but not unpleasant, at the price of the cheapest small beer in England. But the foreign visitor who comes simply for a short pleasure trip on the more or less beaten tracks will not be expected to regale himself upon this peasant fare, good as it is in its way. Of mutton he will find little or none, but veal, especially in the national stew, he will see at most meals, and ox-tongue, with a rich sauce, will appear on the table more frequently than is usual elsewhere. A thin, and, it must be confessed, usually tough steak, to which the adopted English name of beef (spelt _bife_) is given, will be placed before him pretty often, and he will find both the thing and the word omelette—which is never used in Spanish—universal in Portuguese dining-rooms. Through a glorious country of pine-clad uplands and sheltered vineyards the railway runs from Oporto to the former great city of Braga, in Roman times _Bracara Augusta_, and capital of the whole north-western part of the Iberian Peninsula. Its position on a slight elevation in the midst of a vast undulating plain or _cuenca_, surrounded by mountains, has made of Braga the natural emporium of the province, and in each succeeding racial dispensation a royal seat and capital; and it remains to-day, though shorn of its splendour, the ecclesiastical capital of the Spains, claiming precedence over imperial Toledo for its archbishopric and primacy. It is a busy, prosperous place, humming with little spinning and weaving factories, where woollen and cotton fabrics are turned out in great quantities, and hold their own not only here in Minho, but in the rest of Portugal and far Brazil and Portuguese Africa.