A Visit to Portugal and Madeir

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LISBON CONTINUED. 37 CHAPTER III. Various nations had their representatives under the roof of the Hotel de Braganza. Occasionally we encountered in the passages, or saw promenading about on the platform before the house, a Chinese, of most Tartarean aspect. He was servant, I believe, to the Spanish grandee...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LISBON CONTINUED. 37 CHAPTER III. Various nations had their representatives under the roof of the Hotel de Braganza. Occasionally we encountered in the passages, or saw promenading about on the platform before the house, a Chinese, of most Tartarean aspect. He was servant, I believe, to the Spanish grandee I have before mentioned; and report said, an excellent one. There was a Spanish waiter and a German waiter, besides a Portuguese one, and, I believe, a French cook. A Brazilian gentleman had taken apartments in the hotel for five years, as the German waiter informed us; and Americans occasionally took up their quarters there. One day our dinner was not quite as punctual as it might have been; and on inquiring why we had been kept waiting, it appeared our German functionary had been at the bull-fight. Very fine, he said; and negro man rides the bull all one as any horse, saddle and all?quite one, and no difference. And no accidents happen in dese Portuguese bull-fights: only to-day one negro man got his leg broken, and was taken to de hospital ? dat's all. I made inquiries afterwards, and found these poor black men, from time to time, hire themselves out to the proprietors of the bull- circus, and take a prominent part in the entertainments, particularly in enlivening a dull or pusillanimous animal. To the honour of the Portuguese be it said, no horrid spectacles of tor- 38 A SPANISH COMPANY OF BULL-FIGHTERS. tured horses are seen on the arenas of their amphitheatres: the bull's horns are tipped with small balls, and danger to man and beast is, of course, thereby most materially lessened. But it would be well if those poor Brazilian negroes were no longer allowed to risk their limbs for the diversion and gratification of the unthinking populace; although, per...