untold sums, had disappeared. In the course of the day a courier arrived with the news that, owing to a defect in its original construction, the tower had fallen. He was the wealthiest commoner in England, and he made his quinta of Montserrat a paradise of taste during his occupancy; and his successor, Mr. Cook, now styled the Marquis of Montserrat, has added to its luxury and beauty. The grounds are one great fernery: gigantic tropical varieties imported from Australia and Brazil uncurl their croziershaped fronds with a sentient enjoyment of the moist warm air. Tree-ferns shade the paths with their long plumy sprays,

and others shoot up from a fagot of root-stocks with the parabolic curves of a bouquet of rockets. The interior of the château, with its hundreds of arches of white marble, its fountain beneath the central dome, balconied with exquisitely incised alabaster screens from India, its elaborate antique furniture of teak-wood and ebony, its tapestries, paintings, books, and curios, and its corridor of statuary, where reproductions of all, or nearly all, of the various famous statues of Venus predominate over other beautiful creations of the antique, form a bijou worthy of its lovely setting. Beckford's hermitage, an elaborate artificial ruin at the end of the fern terrace, is still preserved. A mutilated antique statue looks out from the ivy, its vague blind eyes filled with a pathetic loneliness, as though it missed the society of the learned misanthrope, who may have executed here the harmonies taught him personally by Mozart, or have written by its side his argumentative letters to Voltaire, or read aloud in languages which it had heard when first formed in some ancient city, for Beckford was an enthusiastic classical scholar,

VOL. LXIIL-No. 375.-26

AT CINTRA.

and of the nine languages which he spoke he loved best Persian and Arabic.

One can not ramble in a wrong direc tion at Cintra. The more modest quintas, buried in Cobaea scandens, in passion-vine, fuchsias, and heliotrope, with the white bells of the silky yucca, and the alabaster trumpet of the datura showing ghost-like against a hedge of dowager dahlias in crimson velvet, are conservatories of radiant color and fragrance. The corktree, resembling somewhat an old appletree, but far more gnarled and twisted, shows everywhere its silvery gray bossy trunks and branches. The stone - pine climbs the mountain, poplars and sycamores shade the roadway, and fountains gurgle refreshingly from niches lined with Moorish tiles. Even the dusty public highway is bordered with a hedge of geraniums, and the huge blue balls of the hydrangea droop over the walls, mingled with sprays of rosy oleander blossoms.

The beggars furnish the only fly in all this box of ointment. To Cintra come the wealthy and the spendthrifts, and to Cintra after them hobble the lame, the halt, the blind, the deaf (we met with no

mutes), the apparently leprous, with every other description of mendicant and follower of St. Lazarus. One wealthy dweller at Cintra had inconsiderately of fered a premium to mendacity by ordering his steward to disburse the sum of five reis (half a cent) daily to whomsoever should apply. The strangest beggars of all were the prisoners. They are poorly fed, and are allowed to suspend baskets from their grated windows, into which the charitably inclined drop food or money. And the Portuguese, as a rule, are charitably inclined.

A very interesting building at Cintra, and one which realizes perfectly our ideal of a haunted mansion, is the Old Palace. There is nothing palatial in its external appearance, if we except its monumental chimneys, which tower above all the sur

rounding buildings, and are the most conspicuous objects architecturally in a distant view of Cintra. Once within the doorway, we seem to have found our way into one of the Waverley novels. It is just the place for ghosts, for murderers concealed behind the arras, for secret staircases, for wassailings in hall and elopement from my lady's boudoir, for the clank of chains in dungeon deep, and the merry jest of fool in cap and bells, and for the king's dwarf. There is hardly a story whose floors run through the building upon the same level. We were constantly going up and down short flights of steps, and there were mysterious turnings and windings which brought us back unaware to the point of departure. Old legends cluster about the building that stimulate the imagination. Half-whis

THE GARDEN OF MONTSERRAT.

cient Alhambra of the Moorish kings, and is a strange jumble of Moorish and Christian architecture.

From the heights of Cintra the towers of Mafra can be seen rising faint and blue where the sky, the sea, and the plain blend in one hazy blur. They are magnetic points for the fancy, and on clear days we could almost fancy that we heard their sweet-voiced chimes calling us to angelus or vespers. We could not resist the attraction, and one bright morning a party of merry English, Scotch, and American folk chartered a diligence drawn by four stout mules, and, with the majority of the party on the outside, bowled gayly along the dusty road to Mafra. Of all the absurd extravagancies of that royal spendthrift João V., none was so recklessly prodigal of expenditure, none so little satisfying as a result, as the erection of the monastery of Mafra. Modelled after the Spanish Escorial, to serve the purpose of royal palace, barracks, con

vent, cathedral, college, museum, catacombs, and caravansary, it now stands idle and deserted, of no more practical use than the Pyramids, and with no æsthetic value to compensate for its lack of utility.

We found the principal entrance of the building open. It led

to a roomy hall, from which diverged corridors, passages, and staircases, introductions to hopeless labyrinths beyond. The air struck us, coming as we did from the glowing sunshine, with a dead chill, and the emptiness, the utter silence and loneliness, impressed the imagination in the same way. There was a delightful absence of officious guides, and we mounted a staircase at a venture. More corridors, halls, mysterious doors. Come, this will never do; we will be lost in a moment more, or find ourselves in the secret dungeons of the Inquisition. Suddenly the light, cheerfulnotes of a piano, the most unexpected sound that could have been imagined in such surroundings, carolled gayly from behind one of the closed doors. We knocked, and as it was opened by a graceful, handsome boy of twelve, we caught a glimpse of a spacious, tastefully furnished, modern drawing-room, one of the apartments of the Count of Mafra, and the only cheerful spot which we saw in the whole gloomy, Jesuitical structure. The boy, a son of the count, now led us courteously to the church, calling on his way for a guide, and accompanying us in our tour over the building. We thought of the Children of the Abbey, of Picciola in the prison court, of all depressing, uncongenial places in which to bring up a bright, mirth-loving boy, and none seemed more dismal than this, and yet he was as merry as one could wish, skipping