Here and there in the doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on.

This hood is of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a marvel of ugliness.

It stands up high and spreads far abroad, and is unfathomably deep.

It fits like a circus tent, and a woman's head is hidden away in it like the man's who prompts the singers from his tin shed in the stage of an opera.

There is no particle of trimming about this monstrous capote, as they call it--it is just a plain, ugly dead-blue mass of sail, and a woman can't go within eight points of the wind with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.
The general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.
The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious.