huge, buff - colored oxen with widespread, curving horns. In Portugal oxen are yoked from the shoulders instead of from the horns, as is the custom in Spain. The cart, with its creaking wooden wheels, is an archaic type (see illustration, page 578). In a near-by field a barefoot woman with tucked-up skirt, skirt, an orange-colored handkerchief wrapped about her head, has dropped her hoe and is adjusting a protective straw cape to a conical haystack. Near her little vine-covered home is a huge corn bin raised on four stone posts, its thatched roof surmounted by a cross, and by a second ornament peculiar to the region, an ancient emblem of fertility. Wheat, maize, oats, and rye are cultivated here. The palatable dark peasant bread is made from corn and oatmeal.

Some of the farmers with side whiskers resemble Irishmen. At a railway station a blind man is playing a merry tune on bagpipes, smaller in size, but fully as shrill as those of the Scottish Highlands.

HOW PORT WINE WAS INTRODUCED INTO ENGLAND

Although Portugal's imports greatly exceed its exports, the industry and frugality of these peasants make national life possible. Men and women of the Minho type have emigrated to the New World and every returning ship brings back their savings to keep the home fires burning.

At Vianna do Castello the Lima River

meets the sea. The town was very much on the map in the days when sailing craft. ruled the waves. Here, in the twelfth century, English Crusaders landed to aid the Portuguese in expelling the Moors, the beginning of the British-Portuguese alliance. From here the mellow wine called "port" was first shipped to England (see, also, text, page 589).

After Vasco da Gama had opened the sea route to India, there was a brisk traffic between Vianna and the ports of Flanders, spices, silks, and porcelains from the Far East being exchanged for manufactured articles. It was then that

the art of Flemish lace making was brought to the wives and daughters of the Portuguese fishermen, who still make "pillow lace."

From Vianna ships sailed far west to the banks off Newfoundland to bring back dried cod, which, in spite of all the fresh fish in Portuguese waters, has ever since been a staple article of diet. Portuguese fishing boats still make the long transatlantic voyage for cod.

The hotels of the Minho are a delightful surprise. Little known to any foreigners save a few British, they are maintained throughout the year for a short summer season, when all the fashionables of central and southern Portugal migrate like birds to the cool, green north. In June the Minho hotel season had not

opened and we were the only guests in the hotel on Santa Lucia Hill, overlooking old Vianna.

We reached the heights by an inclined railway and a steep climb up several flights of stone steps. Beside us walked a girl in her early teens with our three heavy suitcases balanced on her head. When we protested she laughed and declared she could carry twice that weight. Throughout the country we marveled at the burdens borne on the heads of women, who chatted as they walked and seldom used their hands to steady the load.

The menu at Portuguese tourist hotels is French, with an occasional native dish, like caldo verde (soup with greens) or canja, a popular chicken and rice mixture. It is said that several dishes famous in

French cuisine were part of the spoils of the Peninsular War, when a book of recipes from one of the big Portuguese monasteries was carried back to Paris. At Vianna we were introduced to the good, red "Lamego" wine and the golden "Amarante."

We paid a tax of five per cent of the hotel bill to the Tourist Society of Lisbon toward keeping the automobile roads in condition. In the north this money seems well spent; but when the granite hills are left behind and central Portugal reached, the ruts in the road make it evident that the travelers' contribution toward highway improvement is inadequate.

SANTA LUCIA AFFORDS ONE OF WORLD'S FINEST VIEWS

Few views surpass the one from Santa Lucia-those from the heights above Rio de Janeiro and Funchal, perhaps—both in Portuguese-speaking lands.

*

Below our balcony lay a terrace ablaze with flowers; beyond, a forest of pines, chestnuts, and mimosas in golden bloom. Canaries, greenish in hue, like those in the Azores, sang in the trees. Far below lay the city of freshly painted white walls and weather-beaten terra cotta roofs framed in chrome-green fields beside a blue-green sea. In the harbor were red lateen sails of fishing boats homeward bound.

Looking up the valley, we saw the Lima River winding among the hills on whose slopes peaceful white villages nestled. In the distance rose the purple mountains guarding the road to Spain. There was no sound, save the singing of the birds, to break the magic spell.

One morning, when the cuckoo was calling in the woods, we went down from the peaceful heights and crossed the city to the harbor. By the old gray fort three golden-haired, barefoot women were repairing the road; they said they earned five escudos (25 cents) a day. Others were loading into their oxcarts seaweed to be dried and used as a fertilizer.

Each pair of oxen wore a high, ornamented wooden yoke, or canga, of home manufacture, handed down from father to

*See, also, "Rio de Janeiro in the Land of Lure," by Harriet Chalmers Adams, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for Septem

ber, 1920.

son. They are the best bit of "local color" to be found in all Portugal. Their pierced and painted designs differ with the locality. Some have involved, geometrical patterns, undoubtedly Moslem survivals; others have crosses and flowers and may be of Gothic origin; some are surmounted by rows of tufted horsehair (see, also, Color Plate X).

The patient, plodding oxen seem in no way discomforted by these heavy yokes. which, from Oporto south, gradually diminish in height, the decorations disappearing before Lisbon is reached.

Braga, in a sheltered valley back from the sea, was our next town. A book, published locally, contained the startling information that "the town was founded 3.531 years after the creation of the world, by companions of Hannibal, the Carthaginian."

The Romans transformed the village into a provincial capital. Farther east we saw the stone-paved, rock-bordered road which once connected this Roman city of Lusitania with Astorga and Tarragona, in Spain, continuing on to France and Italy. The peasants still use this ancient highway over which the legions marched. After the downfall of the Romans, Braga became the stronghold of Germanic tribes, later to be occupied by the Moslems, Berber and Arab, who swept up from Morocco.

"Of all the sights in Portugal, I like best the romarias in summer at the shrine of Bom Jesus above Braga," an Englishman, who has lived 30 years in Portugal, told me.

PILGRIMAGE ALSO IS HOLIDAY

A pilgrimage and an outdoor holiday combined is the romaria, a very old Iberian institution, whose roots are embedded in traditional pagan feasts. The shrine of Bom Jesus do Monte (Good Jesus of the Mountain) is on a densely wooded hill overlooking the town, where pines, chestnuts, oaks, cork oaks, sycamores, and other trees, not, like these, indigenous to the country, surround the great stone church, with its outlying chapels, and the three hotels which stand near it.

By inclined railway we ascended the steep hill whose slopes are beautified by flowering shrubs. The pilgrims trudge