A few weeks later, I left that land for another, where there lived the Latin master, an individual of no common schooling, a reacher of renown, and above all, a good old chap, Father Manuel da Lixa.

(Ao anoitecer da vida, 1874)

"His name was José Pacheco de Andrade. He came from one of the most notable families in Cabeceiras de Basto […]. Lord of the vast Friúme estate in Ribeira da Pena, he had squandered it on loans as ruinous for him as for his financiers, who, on leaving the sire of the bond to die of hunger, found themselves stripped of the privileges of their fraud and deceit by his immediate successor."

"In 1850, thirty-eight years after he had left Portugal, António de Queirós e Menezes returned to his house in Cimo de Vila in Ribeira da Pena, retired from his commission as a general in the Brazilian empire. He was sixty years old. He had not married, nor had he procured any sort of family. He came alone, older than his years, fully decorated and with little else."

"[…] I wrote a foolscap sheet in quatrains, which the parties interested in the announcement [of an unequal marriage that one of them intended to make, against the will of the elder] fixed to the church door moments before the eleven o’clock mass. The pharmacist, who was on the side of the eldest son, read the satire to the plebs, who roared with laughter. And I stood to the side, contemplating my work, and delighting in the witless guffaws of the heathens!"

"– I know these woods. My Latin master, a priest, called them the Island of Love; it was there that all of the good Latinists among my colleagues read The Art of Love by Ovid; and the cadet, it would appear, applied the Sulmonan’s theories…"