Six weeks afterwards the tables were turned; six weeks spent by Soult in intrigues for his own advancement, and by his officers in discontented idleness. On the 12th May Wellesley and his army from Lisbon surprised him at Oporto in broad daylight, crossing the river a few miles above the city by a brilliant piece of daring, and Soult ignominiously fled north, leaving impedimenta and baggage behind him, harassed and scattered by the Portuguese peasants in arms, until a mere remnant of his force finally found refuge in Spain. The very dinner to which he was about to sit down at Oporto when he was surprised regaled Sir Arthur Wellesley instead, and the victor took up his residence in that big white monastery on the Serra de Pilar, which from the height on the left of the bridge affords a panorama of unequalled beauty of the city opposite on its amphitheatre of hills, shining white and stately against the dark background of the sky.
However you go from the lower level by the river-side to the main streets of the city the climb is a severe one, for in this town of precipitous hills the gradients are startling, even for the electric trams which of late years have completely taken possession of the streets. But we will leave the electric trams on this peregrination, and face the ascent on foot from the lower level of the bridge on the Ribeira itself to the upper town. First some toilsome flights of steps which have taken the place of the lower end of a precipitous alley, cut away to make the approach to the bridge, lead you up about two hundred feet to an ancient winding lane which itself is almost a flight of steps. Quaint foreign interiors are disclosed through the open doors of the dark humble abodes that line the way, and poor little home industries are carried on _coram populo_; half-way up the ladder-like ascent there is a ruined church, and by-and-by on the right we skirt the great battlemented wall of the vast disestablished monastery of Santa Clara. At a turn in the wall the corner of the grim old edifice itself appears, fortress-like and looming here as built for defence in the fierce times of long ago. Through the doubly-grated windows, a few feet above our heads, brown paws are thrust out, and a hoarse murmur from within takes form, by-and-by, as a demand for alms in the name of God. A glance inside makes one start back in horror, almost in disgust, though the sorry spectacle unfortunately soon becomes familiar to those who sojourn in any large Portuguese town. Huddled in squalor and filth together are half-naked, savage-looking criminals, old men, sturdy vagabonds, and youths almost children, staring out from the gloom of the prison-house through the unglazed barred windows, with whining prayer for charity, ribald jest, or explosive curses. These gaol-birds, herded publicly in their unutterable degradation behind the gratings, form the blackest spot visible in Portuguese life. Even Spain for the most part has brought her prisons into some semblance of civilised order, but Portugal in this one respect lags inexplicably behind.