Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/63

Rh burst into flower, the rich massed blossom of the Judas trees glow pink and purple overhead, and in their passing away drift into rose-hued carpets covering the paths and trottoirs. When autumn tints burn on the leaf-shedding trees, thousands of small birds, absent during the summer, return to their old haunts. At sunset the united chorus of the tiny songsters darting in myriads from bough to bough has the curious effect to a listener's ear of the prolonged tones of a strong, shrill steam whistle. All day and far into the night the electric cars pass swiftly up the left of the three roads, and descend by the right, while the broad central road is chiefly used by carriages and automobiles.

Some of the houses standing back on either side of the Avenida are as fine as any in Lisbon, but there is a preponderance of blocks of flats, plain, high buildings, with nothing but their balconies and their setting of clear sunlight to redeem them from sheer ugliness. Right and left of the upper end of the Avenida are new avenues laid out with trees, and showing everywhere the energy of the modern building spirit, which seems to be a strong force not yet duly regulated and controlled in the output of the ambitious projects it set out to accomplish, but giving promise of a splendid future. At the extreme end of the Avenida is the Praça de Pombal, a large rotunda, scantily built around, newly laid out with plants and trees, waiting for its central statue of the great Minister and for the time when it will worthily mark the entrance to the new Park of Edward VII into which the rolling wooded ground beyond is to be converted at no distant date. "Made for the heart of new Lisbon, the Lisbon of the co-operative and collectivist period in which those associations aspired, though lacking the power, to establish a prerogative of justice, this Praça ought to be the socialistic Terreiro do Paço of a socialist Lisbon," daringly writes 39