The first instinct of a traveller when he lights upon such a find as this is to keep it to himself rather than diminish his enjoyment in the possession of his secret by sharing it with others; but Bussaco is big enough, and it would be ungenerous to hide it. It was built by the Portuguese Government, it is said, for a royal residence, and is hardly yet quite finished, for an annexe is now being constructed for the use of the royal family during their summer sojourn, and some of the frescoes in the main castle are still to be added; but it is difficult to understand—unless the intention really was, as stated, to make the place a permanent royal residence—the reason for spending the vast sums of money that the place must have cost upon a house of public entertainment. However, there it stands, with its stately tower, its majestic carved staircase, and all its heraldic blazonry, in the midst of a crown domain seized from a Carmelite monastery, probably the most beautiful hotel in Europe, certainly by far the best in the Peninsula; in an exquisite climate, with perfect sanitation and water, a good white wine grown on its own hillside, a cuisine with which no fault can reasonably be found, cleanliness, and order; a Swiss lessee who speaks English fluently and understands English needs, a bill of almost disconcerting moderation ... and the woods! For, after all, the hotel-palace, the golf-links, the tennis-lawn, the ballroom, and all the rest of the added attractions of the place, are but subsidiary incidents to the terrestrial paradise that surrounds it, enclosed in its high granite wall six miles in circumference. [Illustration: MANUELINE ARCHITECTURE AT THE HOTEL, BUSSACO] It was night when the gleaming salt-white palace first flashed upon me out of the darkness, but when I opened my shutters as the dawn was breaking the next morning, and stepped out upon the wide battlements of the castle, the scene before me was so wonderful as to force from me an involuntary prayer of praise and thankfulness to God that so much of beauty should be vouchsafed to my senses. Below and around me for miles on all sides stretched the woods, woods such as I have seen nowhere else in Europe, though the private gardens and plantations of Cintra and Monserrat approach them in luxuriant fertility. Great palms and towering cedars of Lebanon grow side by side with oaks of giant bulk: oranges and fig-trees, cork and acacia, maple, birch, and willow stand beneath the straight eucalyptus, “tall as the mast of some great admiral”: araucarias spread their spiny branches with a luxuriance never seen at home, and mosses, ivy, and ferns clothe thickly every inch of ground, every bank, and even the time-worn stones, that all around testify to the existence of dwelling here long before the white palace raised its tall tower over the darkening wood.