Fayal is not an expensive place. One pays six dollars a week at an
excellent hotel, and there is nothing else to spend money on, except
beggars and donkeys. For a shilling an hour one can go to ride, or, as
the Portuguese phrase perhaps circuitously expresses it, go to walk
on horseback on a donkey,--_dar um passeio a cavallo n'um burro_. The
beggars, indeed, are numerous; but one's expenditures are always happily
limited by the great scarcity of small change. A half-cent, however,
will buy you blessings enough for a lifetime, and you can find an
investment in almost any direction. You visit some church or cemetery;
you ask a question or two of a lounger in a black cloak, with an air
like an exiled Stuart, and, as you part, he detains you, saying, "Sir,
will you give me some little thing, (_alguma cousinha_,)--I am so poor?"
Overwhelmed with a sense of personal humility, you pull out three
half-cents and present them with a touch of your hat, he receives them
with the same, and you go home with a feeling that a distinguished honor
has been done you. The Spaniards say that the Portuguese are "mean even
in their begging": they certainly make their benefactors mean; and I can
remember returning home, after a donation of a whole _pataco_, (five
cents,) with a debilitating sense of too profuse philanthropy.
It is inevitable that even the genteel life of Fayal should share this
parsimony.
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