[ CHAPTER VII
] COUNTRY WAYS AND COUNTRY FOLK

The Portuguese peasants, dark-faced and unshaven, often look such ruffians that at first, when you meet them on some lonely country track, you would not be at all surprised if they brandished a knife over your head with the blood-curdling challenge of “Your money or your life!”

But in reality they are nice civil fellows, anxious to please in any way they can, friendly and full of natural politeness. Do you ask your way in broken sentences, your scanty Portuguese vocabulary helped out with signs and gesticulations, the Portuguese workman will take the greatest trouble, first of all to discover your meaning, and then to help you and make himself understood, even going out of his way to accompany you to some point of vantage, from whence he may the more easily direct you. Then, with a smile, a bow, and lifted hat, he will go on his way ready to act the good Samaritan to the next comer.

Would you like to imagine you are going for a walk in Portugal, and that you see all the quaint country folk we should pass? Let us choose a pretty walk—say down the valley to Collares, that little village of vintage fame at the foot of the Cintra range of mountains, which tower above us on the left, their summits standing out in bold masses of rock, clear-cut against a deep blue sky.

It is spring-time, and all the fruit-trees are in blossom. Tender spring colouring throws its veil of softest shimmering green over the tall poplars, and wherever we look there are wild-flowers, springing up in the fields and on the roadside and on the rock-strewn slopes of the untilled land. Such wild-flowers! Vivid gentian-blue, and deepest rose, and many that we know quite well, and cultivate with so much trouble in our gardens at home. Tall, starry-shaped asphodels, slender white lilies and large blue ones, snapdragons, lupins, orchids, gladioli, blue and yellow irises, mallows, foxgloves, and many others; and climbing among the cistus-bushes are wild-roses, and sweet-smelling honeysuckle and everlasting peas, and there are the large, rose-like white flowers of the cistus itself, with a handsome dark brown blotch on each leaf. Brightest of all are the fields of blue convolvulus, looking as though a piece of summer sky had lost itself, and had been caught and held prisoner in the grass.

A QUIET POOL AT CINTRA.

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Down the valley flows a little brook clear as crystal, which goes bubbling and gurgling along; gliding shyly round the big rocks as though it wondered what it would find on the other side, and then, grown bolder, leaping with a sparkle and a splash over some tiny waterfall into a deeper pool below. There is an old moss-grown bridge with maidenhair ferns peeping out from between the stones. We cross over, and before long the footpath comes out into the dusty road.