Ten cents a week may not seem worth a whole day's journey on foot, but
by the Fayal standard it is amply worth it. The usual rate of wages for
an able-bodied man is sixteen cents a day; and an acquaintance of ours,
who had just got a job on the roads at thirty cents a day, declined a
good opportunity to emigrate to America, on the ground that it was best
to "let well alone." Yet the price of provisions is by no means very
low, and the difference is chiefly in abstinence. But fuel and clothing
cost little, since little is needed,--except that no woman thinks
herself really respectable until she has her great blue cloak, which
requires an outlay of from fifteen to thirty dollars, though the whole
remaining wardrobe may not be worth half that. The poorer classes pay
about a dollar a month in rent; they eat fish several times a week
and meat twice or thrice a year, living chiefly upon the coarsest
corn-bread, with yams and beans. Still they contrive to have their
luxuries. A soldier's wife, an elderly woman, said to me pathetically,
"We have six _vintems_ (twelve cents) a day,--my husband smokes and I
take snuff,--and how _are_ we to buy shoes and stockings?" But the most
extreme case of economy which I discovered was that of a poor old woman,
unable to tell her own age, who boarded with a poor family for four
_patacos_ (twenty cents) a month, or five cents a week.
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