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

The Innocents Abroad