Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/265

Rh them into it. It cured me. From that day I had no more fear of vermin and reptiles, which is just as well in a country where nature is over-luxuriant. A little while after we changed our rooms we were succeeded by Lord and Lady Lytton, and, to my infinite delight, I heard the same screams coming from the same room a little while after. 'There!' I said in triumph, 'you see I am not the only woman who does not like cockroaches.

The Burtons tarried two months in Portugal, and explored it from end to end, and Isabel made notes of everything she saw in her characteristic way. Space does not permit of giving the account of her Portuguese tour in full, but we are fain to find room for the following descriptions of a bull-fight and procession at Lisbon. Burton insisted on taking his wife (whose loathing of cruelty to animals was intense) to see it, probably to accustom her betimes to the savage sights and sounds which might await her in the semi-civilized country whither they were bound. "At first," she says, "I crouched down with my hands over my face, but I gradually peeped through one finger and then another until I saw the whole of it." And this is what she saw:

"On Sunday afternoon at half-past four we drove to the Campo di Sta. Anna, where stands the Praça dos Touros, or Bull Circus, a wooden edifice built in the time of Dom Miguel. It is fitted with five hundred boxes, and can contain ten thousand persons. It is a high, round, red building, ornamented. The circle has a barrier and then a space all round, and a second and higher barrier where the people begin. They were