The place is one which to my latest days I shall never forget. A clean little rectangular town with straight streets of singularly modern aspect, on the banks of an exquisitely beautiful stream fringed by trees and gardens. The shops for the most part are but doorways open upon the street, for they have not adopted the modern fashion of windows for the display of goods. And life in general seems to pass drowsily, for with the exception of a small factory in some ancient conventual buildings on the farther bank of the stream, there is not much doing in the place. But the object of my coming to this sweet, dull, little town pervades it everywhere. At the end of the three straight streets running from the river to the square market-place, with its ancient church and town-hall, there looms upon a steep hill, right up over the roofs as it seems, the most splendid and interesting mediæval castle-monastery in this land of hill-top strongholds—the ancient fortress headquarters of the crusading knights of the Order of Christ, successors in Portugal of the Templars. Thomar was the metropolis and fief of the Order, and on all sides the emblem of their peculiar cross is evident. Impressed upon my mind for ever is the view as I first gazed upon it from the main street (of course, incongruously called now after Serpa Pinto) on the sparkling autumn day. Clear and sharp high up on the hill against the indigo sky stood a ruined bell tower through whose gaping window the light shone, with tall, pointed cypresses by its side, and flanked by a mighty stretch of warm, grey battlements, above which rose the bulk of a great square keep. A zigzag path leads from behind the sixteenth-century town-hall in the praça up the rocky sides of the precipitous hill. Gnarled olive trees, dwarf oaks, and aloes grew in the crevices and amidst the ruins of outer walls upon the face of the declivity; and the outer donjon, still standing unwrecked across the path, shows the tremendous strength even of these exterior defences. Above these loomed the Titanic walls, their battlemented sides and turrets, all stained a golden yellow with the lichen that covered them. The inner donjon, which adjoins the picturesque ruined bell tower, gives entrance to a charming grassy garden with tall cypresses, orange trees, and gay flowers, growing in what was once the wide courtyard of the castle; and the huge square main keep standing in the midst, all dismantled as it is, rears its flame-tinged battlements as proudly as when the soldiers of the Cross held this isolated stronghold against the hordes of Islam. The walls are everywhere pierced with loopholes in the shape of a cross surmounting a globe, and the cruciform device of the Order is graven upon stones on all sides. [Illustration: SOME BEAUTIES OF THOMAR.]