I
have looked through the crowded halls of Saratoga in vain for one
such figure as I have again and again seen descending those steep
mountain-paths with a bundle of firewood on the head, or ascending them
with a basket of farm-manure. No person who has never left America can
appreciate the sensation of living among healthy women; often as I heard
of this, I was utterly unprepared for the realization; I never lost the
conscious enjoyment of it for a single day; and when I reached home and
walked across Boston Common on a June Sunday, I felt as if I were in a
hospital for consumptives.
This condition of health cannot be attributed to any mere advantage of
climate. The higher classes of Fayal are feeble and sickly; their diet
is bad, they take no exercise, and suffer the consequences; they have
all the ills to which flesh is heir, including one specially Portuguese
complaint, known by the odd name of _dor do cotovelo_, elbow-disease,
which corresponds to that known to Anglo-Saxons, by an equally bold
symbol, as the green-eyed monster, Jealousy. So the physical superiority
of the peasantry seems to come solely from their mode of life,--out-door
labor, simple diet, and bare feet. Change these and their health goes;
domestic service in foreign families on the island always makes them
ill, and often destroys their health and bloom forever; and strange
to say, that which most nauseates and deranges their whole physical
condition, in such cases, is the necessity of wearing shoes and
stockings.
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