MADEIRA.
15
the rest is still retained by the friars. Their church is uncommonly fine in its interior proportions, and must have been very imposing in the days of its splendor. Those days are gone. Dirt, silence, and misery were conspicuous through ignorance and superstition. The friars looked wretched, and one poor fellow without shoes or shirt moved my compassion to that degree, that I conferred a pistorine upon him. He seemed as grateful as if I had taught him to read his breviary, which he confessed to me he could not do. There was some time ago a chapel here, as I understood it, entirely constructed of human skulls, but upon inquiry I found it was destroyed or removed. The Portuguese ladies in Madeira never wash their faces, and complain that the English destroy their fine complexions by too much water. Dry rubbing is the thing. If you intend to visit a woman, you send notice over night, and then she puts on her corset, and dresses herself as if for a ball. So you meet them in the streets, lying in their palanquins, with one pretty ancle hanging outside, and in rich evening costume. A man ought to have more phlegm in his constitution than I have, to travel with serenity in Madeira. When you intend to make an excursion, you send a servant to the corner of the street to summon the muleteers; at the word, down they come scampering to your door, men and boys, horses, mules, and ponies.