high upon the wall, from which glowered evil faces and thrust thievish hands. For here, again, on this happy holiday afternoon in Braga, the gaol-birds held their levee. Beneath their bars stood their womenkind and children, consoling or grieving; and little bags hung down at the end of strings from the windows to receive the gifts it pleased their friends to send up to the sinister rascals, whose hoarse ribaldry or whining appeal broke in ever and anon upon the gay chatter of the fountain. As if in irony, the church that faced the monastery prison bore upon its front the name the “Temple of the Sacred Order of Penitence.” Of contrition one saw little sign on the part of those who from behind their bars looked for all their weary day upon the church commemorating the unmerited self-reproach of the “Seraphic Father St. Francis.” [Illustration: THE AFTER-GLOW AT BRAGA.] There is one thing throughout Portugal that may be unhesitatingly condemned, and here in Braga the evil is as patent as elsewhere. The old traditional and, in many cases, historical names of the praças and streets have been changed wholesale and wantonly for those of passing and second-rate celebrities, political and otherwise. In Braga the ancient Largo da Lapa has been turned into Largo de Hintze Ribeiro, after the leader of the Liberal party in the Cortes, and there is hardly a town in Portugal in which the principal squares and thoroughfares do not bear the name of Hintze Ribeiro, or of his rival politician, Conselheiro João Franco. Serpa Pinto and Mouzinho de Albuquerque, two fire-eating African explorers, who in the jingo colonial fever of a few years ago, when the feeling against England ran high, were made heroes, are commemorated in streets innumerable throughout Portugal, to the exclusion of names which were often quaint and significant landmarks of long ago. The palace of the Archbishops of Braga hardly corresponds in appearance with the high claims of the primate, for the church in Portugal is sadly shorn of its splendour, and part of the rambling palace is a ruin; but the cathedral offers many points of interest. Enthusiastic local antiquarians are confident that the first edifice was raised by Saint James himself in the lifetime of the Holy Virgin. But, however that may be, the present church certainly dates from the twelfth century; and though, as usual, the seventeenth century did its best to spoil and smother its primitive simplicity; yet, as in the case of Oporto Cathedral, which that of Braga much resembles, the stern solidity of the original work stands out clear from the frippery by which it is overlaid.