Winkle.
We found or fancied other Orientalisms. A visitor claps his hands at
the head of the court-yard stairs, to summon an attendant. The solid
chimneys, with windows in them, are precisely those described by
Urquhart in his delightful "Pillars of Hercules"; so are the gardens,
divided into clean separate cells by tall hedges of cane; so is the game
of ball played by the boys in the street, under the self-same Moorish
name of _arri_; so is the mode of making butter, by tying up the
cream in a goat-skin and kicking it till the butter comes. Even the
architecture fused into one all our notions of Gothic and of Moorish,
and gave great plausibility to Urquhart's ingenious argument for
the latter as the true original. And it is a singular fact that the
Mohammedan phrase _Oxald_, "Would to Allah," is still the most familiar
ejaculation in the Portuguese language and the habitual equivalent in
their religious books for "Would to God."
We were treated with great courtesy and hospitality by our Portuguese
neighbors, and an evening party in Fayal is in some respects worth
describing. As one enters, the anteroom is crowded with gentlemen, and
the chief reception-room seems like a large omnibus, lighted, dressed
with flowers, and having a row of ladies on each side. The personal
beauty is perhaps less than one expects, though one sees some superb
dark eyes and blue-black hair; they dress with a view to the latest
French fashions, and sometimes rather a distant view.
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