Excerpt from Through Portugal

Portugal had been familiar to me from my earliest youth, for my road to and from Spain had often lain that way, and circumstances had made me conversant with the language and his tory of the country, and yet this book is not the outcome of any such previous knowledge, but mainly of one short voyage in search of change and health. It happened in this way. As oft befalls men who in this striving world have to wring their brains for drachmas, the completion of a particularly arduous book had left me tem porarily a nervous wreck, sleepless and despairing. The first and most obvious need dictated to me by those who settle such matters, was to forget for a time that pens, ink, and paper existed, and to seek relaxation in a clime where printers cease from troubling and reviewers are at rest. But where? Spain certainly would offer me no such a haven: France was too near home, Germany I disliked, Switzerland was trite and overrun, the novelty of Italy I had long before exhausted.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.