Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/36

Rh into the sleepy suburbs and beyond. Through leafy boulevards, up and down hill, or along the water front, they glide in straight or diagonal lines, now meandering through a tortuous web of narrow streets between high, quaint houses, with painted shutters and balconies, showing a trailing plant, or a parrot cage, or the gay-tinted garments of an inmate's washing; now emerging on a square or rotunda where stands an ancient monastery, or a church, a palace or a theatre, a fountain or an open garden planted out with trees and flower beds; now entering a straight street in some hollow, whence streets mount up on either side so steep that, as in San Francisco, steps breaks the declivity at intervals, and the houses are seen piled on the hills in severe yet irregular outlines, and masses of soft, tender colours, that give a curiously mediæval effect.

Back again by another route equally striking, equally novel, the same car bears one to the chief starting place of all, the Rocio, or Praça de Dom Pedro, the liveliest square in Lisbon. English sailors gave it the name of Turkey square after the flocks of turkeys congregated there for sale in days when, instead of the imposing monument erected as recently as 1870, there stood in the centre an ancient pile of cubiform stones, humorously nicknamed the Galheteiro, or Cruet-stand of the Rocio. Figures of every type and class are for ever strolling about, or crossing the bewildering waves of its mosaic pavement, or lounging on the seats under the trees which line the borders. The handsome fountains, one at each end, are brimming with the play of water over the upper basins into the spacious ones below, where bronze mermaids curled up on their tails, hold up tapering conches to catch the spray.

The sparkle of sunlight on the water, the colour and simple gaiety of the changing pictures on every side of the 16