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Roman Holidays, and Others by William Dean Howells
page 8 of 280 (02%)
might overdo it. Nature is modest in her most magnificent moods, and I
do not see how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It
can never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably stated: low
lying sea; the town scattering and fraying everywhere into outlying
hamlets, villas and cottages; steep rising upon steep, till they reach
uninhabitable climaxes where the woods darken upward into the
everlasting snows, in one whole of grandeur resuming in its unity every
varying detail.

I dwell rather helplessly upon the scenery, because it was what we
professedly went up or half up, or one-tenth or-hundredth up, the
mountain for. Un-professedly we went up in order to come down by the
toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to attempt
anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch,
we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people
at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness
from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a
facade so satisfy-ingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly
Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were at
prayer within; irregular files of them attended our progress to give us
the opportunity of doing charity. The beggars were of every sort, sex,
and age, and some, from the hands they held out, with fingers reduced to
their last joints, looked as if they might be lepers, but I do not say
they were. What I am sure of is that the faces of the worshippers--men,
women, and children--when they came out of the church were of a
gentleness which, if it was not innocence and goodness, might well have
passed for those virtues. They had kind eyes, which seemed as often blue
as black, and if they had no great beauty they were seldom quite ugly. I
wish I could think we strangers, as they gazed curiously, timorously at
us, struck them as favorably.
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