A Year of Prophesying by H.G. Wells — Read

For several weeks just recently I was cut off from Britain and America and most of the things that interest me in the world by a postal strike in Portugal. It was an original sort of strike. The little dears went to their offices and so forth, and just did nothing until the Government kept a promise to raise salaries. Telegrams and letters coagulated in masses that are still incompletely dissolved. Some of the more humorous of the strikers mixed up the letters, and delivered considerable numbers at the wrong addresses, where many perished miserably. Meanwhile I read the Lisbon _Diario de Noticias_, which has about as much foreign news as the _West Sussex Gazette_, and meditated on Portugal. To which country I had come, by the by, because it was within three days' post of England and a most convenient cable centre.

Portugal has a climate that is always interesting and generally delightful. It has its wild phases of sea-wind and passionate rain, and then the only thing to do here at Estoril -- except work -- is to go to the western headlands and see the green Atlantic waves hit the cliffs and explode into vast mountains of sunlit foam. And to get caught and drenched by a rainstorm, and so home. Or the north wind blows, and usually it is the north wind that blows, and then the air is as keen and sweet as Alpine air and the sky is blazing blue. The flowers are astonishing. There is purple iris in all the water courses; the banks are alive with periwinkle and tall spikes of antirrhinum; in the woods are endless scillas and rock roses.