Chapter 6 - Page 2

to
twenty-four cents a day, and those of a good mechanic about twice as
much. They count it in reis at a thousand to the dollar, and this makes
them rich and contented. Fine grapes used to grow in the islands, and an
excellent wine was made and exported. But a disease killed all the vines
fifteen years ago, and since that time no wine has been made. The
islands being wholly of volcanic origin, the soil is necessarily very
rich. Nearly every foot of ground is under cultivation, and two or three
crops a year of each article are produced, but nothing is exported save a
few oranges--chiefly to England. Nobody comes here, and nobody goes
away. News is a thing unknown in Fayal. A thirst for it is a passion
equally unknown. A Portuguese of average intelligence inquired if our
civil war was over. Because, he said, somebody had told him it was--or
at least it ran in his mind that somebody had told him something like
that! And when a passenger gave an officer of the garrison copies of the
Tribune, the Herald, and Times, he was surprised to find later news in
them from Lisbon than he had just received by the little monthly steamer.
He was told that it came by cable. He said he knew they had tried to lay
a cable ten years ago, but it had been in his mind somehow that they
hadn't succeeded!

It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes. We
visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old and found in it a
piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified. It
was polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if
the dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen
centuries ago. But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood
unhesitatingly.

In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver--at
least they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred
to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners)--and before
it is kept forever burning a small lamp. A devout lady who died, left
money and contracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul, and
also stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, day and
night. She did all this before she died, you understand. It is a very
small lamp and a very dim one, and it could not work her much damage, I
think, if it went out altogether.

The great altar of the cathedral and also three or four minor ones are a
perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread. And they have a swarm of
rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some
on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and
some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left
to blow--all of