move it out in the country if they wanted it where they could go and find

it again when they needed it. The group on the pier was a rusty one--men

and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and

unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession beggars. They

trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid

of them. We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these

vermin surrounded us on all sides and glared upon us; and every moment

excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good look back,

just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on his

advertising trip from street to street. It was very flattering to me to

be part of the material for such a sensation. Here and there in the

doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on. This hood

of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a

marvel of ugliness. It stands up high and spreads far abroad, and is

unfathomably deep. It fits like a circus tent, and a woman's head is

hidden away in it like the man's who prompts the singers from his tin

shed in the stage of an opera. There is no particle of trimming about

this monstrous capote, as they call it--it is just a plain, ugly

dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can't go within eight points of the

wind with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.

The general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will

remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its

capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to

tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.

The Innocents Abroad