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Carvalho brought us there grapes, and knew that here without a word, and smiled his wide, silent smile at the effect of his surprise.

But on this first expedition which he made with us we walked by the river's edge until the white walls of a Quinta appeared on the hill above, and he led the way into the shadow of its garden, planted round a fountain covered with roses.

As unexpected as the enchanted palaces which rise in fairy stories before the traveller, the Quinta was all ready to receive us. Wistaria covered the walls, and twisted in huge heaps round the pillars of the verandah. Tea was spread out, and one of the cakes which are not the least among the joys of the Douro,-spongecakes as big as a mill-stone, with a hole in the middle.

Carvalho disappeared, to join the unseen powers who had prepared this feast. The sun went down, the hills became as purple as the wistaria clusters which framed them for us. The day was ending, and Carvalho had shown us the Douro as only he could show it, but like a true dramatist he kept his climax to the last.

It lay behind the great wooden doors of the Quinta cellars, and as he turned the key one felt that the burden of appreciation laid upon one's shoulders was awful in its gravity. But we did not fail him.

We saw the row of giant barrels rising to the roofbeams, holding the young wine all sugary from last year's

at last was the heart of the Douro. The cool darkness was hiding the stored sunshine of many anxious days, and the red liquor which he was running from the tap meant more to Carvalho than grape juice which would some day be port.

Imagination drew the picture of the great casks as he saw them. Each one held different memories of toil, hope, suspense. Long preparations and responsibilities for him before the days of the gathering and the treading of the grapes. Disappointments to be forgotten, triumphs to be remembered, when at length the juice ran from the vats, giving promise of the wine to be.

There in the twilight one felt the mystery of the Douro, and searched in vain to understand even the least of its secrets. Perhaps if one came to it in the humming days of the vintage, when all the valley is astir, and the clouds of insects dance in the sun, and make the sweltering nights hideous, one might know it as it is. But in April it is only stirring in its sleep, and gathering its forces with uneasy murmurs. The labourers have come down from the mountain villages to dig the roots of the budding vines, but there is no joy yet, only a fierce energy, in the working of the crumbled soil.

Such is the Douro, as it shows itself to the stranger,

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political, natural conditions mountains and travel down have made it unique. Small with the river to Oporto. as it is when measured by miles, it produces the sole supply of a commodity which the world demands. If we imagine the Douro vineyards wiped out by some convulsion of nature, we must picture also a world deprived of port.

Great Britain would be the loser, for though other countries in the past may have paid for what they did not get, the wine shipped to us from Oporto has always travelled down the Douro first.

It was when the French wars of the eighteenth century shortened the supply of the French wines in English markets that port became the fashion, but there were British firms established in Oporto even before that. Scotland was in the van, as usual. One of the first shipping houses was founded by Peter Beardsley, a Scot who lived at Vianna, in Northern Portugal, in the middle of the eighteenth century. When he visited the Douro valley on a sporting expedition he tasted its wine, and judged it fit to send home to his countrymen. Thus in early days did port receive the highest of all possible tributes. Now the export trade done in it from Oporto is practically all in English hands, and some of the vineyards also, famous vineyards, whose very names carry assurance of quality to those who understand. English money is the backbone of the Douro, but to see how England has set her mark upon the country we we must leave the VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXL.

With many twists it flows, carrying in their season the wine-boats on their precarious journey. As it draws near to the town its banks become cliffs, and Oporto is crowded upon them, a precipice of houses. Two bridges of single span are arched high over the stream, and far below them lie the quays full of the gay rascality of the South.

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Across the water are the Wine Lodges Cockburns, Sandemans, Taylors, Dows, and other familiar names which strike strangely upon the ear in so un-English a setting. They are all there, built more or less above the reach of the river, which when it came down in flood this year set loose great ships and swept them out to sea. It worked havoc, too, among some of the low-lying Lodges. How much it found in them to destroy is difficult to realise by description. The vats of the Douro Quintas, perhaps not more than three times the height of a man, are toys beside the casks of Oporto. It is useless to say that they hold (many of them) fourteen thousand dozen bottles of port, for how can the human mind seize such a conception? The eye must see a vista of their vast shapes stretching in double rows from end to end of the sheds before it can realise the output of the Quintas and the trade which is done from Oporto.

It is a trade which carries a long tradition, and in the Factory House, on the opposite

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shore, that tradition has left a relic of itself even more entrancing to the imagination than the Wine Lodges and the prosperity they typify of the present.

The word as we use it in England has no relation to this Factory at Oporto, which means the Club founded there by English merchants a hundred and twenty years ago, when Great Britain opened her markets to the Douro wine.

There never was a building more stamped with the individuality of its own continuous history. At this present hour some members of the Factory are the successors of the original firms who came in those days to Oporto and made their Club the centre of English life in the city. They are very few now, and overhoused in the big rooms. The "Rua dos Ingleses" has changed in name and character since the days when its high houses sheltered the quality of Oporto, but the sober dignity of the Factory cannot touched by the advancing tide of squalor. Portugal is left at its threshold, behind its doors is England the England of England of the Georges.

The spirit of the sedate decorous gaiety of a century ago still fills its great ballroom. The delicate decoration of white panelled walls has been scarcely faded by the passing years, the chandeliers sparkle from the ceiling as they did in the days when violins from the musicians' gallery summoned the company to quadrilles or country dance.

More solid is the furnishing of the dining-room, whose table might seat nearly a hundred guests, and of the room beyond, in which the same guests gathered round a like table to drink the port, which we may easily believe could satisfy even such judges as those.

On the walls hang portraits of some of the founders of the Factory,-the men who were able in an alien land to create so undying an atmosphere of their country and their time. But there is another record of those who have shared their hospitality. In the faded ink of the visitors' book are written names which have sounded through Europe. One would think that half the British Army had been entertained in the Factory during the years of the Peninsular War. Their signatures and the titles of their regiments on those pages stir the past so strangely that, reading them, one can almost hear the ring of their spurs through the rooms to-day.

The Factory served its day and generation well, and it may be that its walls have held together the strong traditions and pride in the past which lift the history of Oporto's wine trade above the mere records of commerce. But there is no room for the commonplace anywhere in the enterprise which makes its beginning in the Douro mountains, follows the Douro river to such a city as Oporto, and commits its treasure to the high seas at last.

BLANCHE E. C. DUGDALE.

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IT was at an Up-country Fair in Bengal that we saw "Hamlet" played by a native company, and it rounded off our fairing in an instructive and delightful way. We had gone to the Fair-the Collector and his wife and two babes, Clothilde and I-because the Collector had been asked to open it, and the rest of us wanted to go. We travelled by means of one tonga, four ponies, and two elephants, one of the elephants acting as perambulator when the tonga got stuck at particularly bad bits of the road. We did the forty miles in two days, which is good travelling for Bengal, especially as we got a leopard on the road. Speaking exactly, the leopard was off the road about about three hundred yards, in a grass jungle. A little cloud of vultures circling over it, waiting for it to finish its meal, gave us the clue to its whereabouts. was wounded by the first bullet, and made a spring for Clothilde's legs, Clothilde being on the pad of our second elephant, but it missed its spring, and the next shot finished it.

alive with a hundred thousand natives, and countless elephants, camels, cattle, and ponies.

That was the Fair, and the whole air tingled with the dust of it, and we gulped it down red-hot from the sun as we rode in. Doctor Johnson never drank at a sitting more tea than I did when we arrived at the Dak bungalow.

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From its verandah there was plenty of Fair life to be seen without stirring. Bhutanese, sturdy pig-tailed buccaneers, rode past driving before them a herd of their shaggy little ponies-the sort Bengali subinspectors of police love to acquire and ride, partly because they have superbly flowing manes and tails, partly because they can be cantered twenty miles without stopping under an Indian sun. These ponies, like Nicholas Nickleby Dotheboys Hall, are remarkable for their straight legs. It The ordinary ordinary Bengali tat, ridden or burdened from its cradle, never has straight legs, and an Englishman told me of one he had borrowed for the day whose legs were set at such weird angles that it could not stand up till he got on its back. Then his weight pressed them in the directions necessary for balance, and it went with spirit after after dacoits. After the Bhutanese, and swallowing their dust, would go bullockcarts bringing merchants' wares, the drivers walking; then, perhaps, the merchant himself, magnificent on a tat

Apart from the leopard, the dust was the most noticeable thing on the road, especially as we drew near to the Fair in the afternoon of the second day. If there had been any wind we should have been buried by the dust. Two hundred acres of sandy sunbaked plain crowded with street after street of booths,

going cuddam, bath - slippers on feet that nearly touched the ground, and no stirrups. It

is a curious pace, this cuddam, and I do not know if it obtains outside of India. The pony using it seems to flicker or shiver along, and there is no more motion for its rider than for a lady in a bath-chair. It is eminently suited for the Babu, being both slow and comfortable, and I take it that the nearest English equivalent to it was the amble of the monks of Chaucer's time on their way to Canterbury.

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the part of victims with almost equal ardour. Our way through the Fair, crowded though it was, was clear enough, since we only wanted to stroll along examining the booths at our leisure. But the policeman would not have it so. To left or to right he would dart, shoving some poor unfortunate who might conceivably have been in our way had we been going that way. The person shoved would seek credit by shoving the man nearest him, who would shove the next, who would shove a boy, who would shove a smaller boy. Nobody seemed to mind. Indeed they all seemed to enjoy it except ourselves, who wanted peace instead of this hurlyburly, and could not command the policeman in his native tongue. We were rescued by coming across Mr Chundar.

Then a north-country man would go by on a camel, and some local zemindar would trot his native devil-eared horse past us as fast as it would go, in the hope that we were watching and admiring. We did watch for a time, and afterwards Clothilde and I set out for the Fair. The formal opening was to be next day, but we wanted to see it by ourselves first, and without ceremony. The desire was a Almost before we had passed the gate leading in, we were sighted by a policeman, who either wished to earn merit or to assert a brief authority. At any rate, he constituted himself our vanguard, and after that, peace and privacy were impossible. Authority in this countrywhere, according to the Babu, liberty calls loudly to the soul of every man-is not regarded as a means to an end. It is an end in itself and a veritable passion. If a Bengali sees a chance of bullying he will take it, and his fellows will accept

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I had met Mr Chundar once before. He was a middle-aged Bengali Babu, engaged estate agent and general factotum to the Rajah upon whose grounds the Fair was held. Under Mr Chundar's ægis the Fair took shape, and he was responsible for its success failure. But his chief glory was that he was a Barrister-at-law of- so far as I remember-the Middle Temple. Barristers-at-law in this country enjoy a certain dignity and distinction. Mr Chundar also enjoyed what dignity a solar topi and a frock-coat and trousers might give him. But it was some years since he had trod the Middle Temple, and I suppose that he had forgotten that with a frock-coat one used

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