again; the ox-wains carried away the produce and merchandise; the stalls and booths folded their canvas sides and disappeared, and the next morning Leiria resumed its habitual sleep, from which it awakens but once a week. [Illustration: THE ENCARNAÇÃO, LEIRIA.] ----- Footnote 1: I noted with interest that this castle of Ourem, and others of these vast hill-top strongholds, had the outer defences arranged similarly to those I have described in the chapter on the buried city of Citania; namely, that on the side of the hill, where attack was difficult or impracticable, the outer walls dipped far down the slope, whilst at the point where danger might be apprehended the three lines of circumvallation were comparatively close together. This arrangement of hill-top defences was evidently long pre-Roman in the Peninsula, and seems to have been adopted by the Romans and their Gothic successors. VI BATALHA AND ALCOBAÇA I drove out of Leiria in the morning just as the business of the market was in full swing; and for the first half-hour of the upward way amidst a country of vines and olives, we met crowds of country people riding into the town on heavily laden asses. Then, mounting high above the plain, we passed into the region of pines and heather, where the warm but invigorating air came charged with the scent of thyme, lavender, and rosemary. At a point of the road, about eight miles from Leiria, a deep hollow opens to the left, and at the bottom of it, and reached by a downhill road running almost parallel with the way we came, lies the world-famed abbey of Batalha, the wonder and envy of ecclesiastical architects for six centuries, and even now, dismantled and bedevilled as it is, one of the most beautiful Gothic structures in existence.