Chapter II: Part 2

This time you must climb the mountains back of Rio for the night. Had ever an emperor such a park as Dom Pedro made of these mountains of Tijuca! Thirty miles of park road, swept every week, lighted by gas, winding in and out, up and down the precipitous slopes of mountains green to the top! And such green! the green of palms and tree ferns, of trees with orchids and sipos. Every few yards brings you to a distinctly new view: sometimes it includes the Atlantic, sometimes the Rio harbor, sometimes the distant city, more often a lovely valley, a waterfall, a height of rock all covered with ferns and mosses, and another stretch of your winding road with a railing of tall, graceful bamboos growing at some dangerous place. You are shown the spots which Agassiz specially studied and stay in the old hotel where he stayed. Why do people go to Petropolis with this beautiful spot so much nearer? Because, in the summer-time, between December and April, yellow fever has been known to get a little lodgment even here; rarely, it is true, but the foreigner who knows his new home never takes any risks. He will not stay in Rio during fever-time after sundown. He will not go out in the early morning without his coffee. If he has the slightest intimation of fever he takes castor oil without a moment’s delay. If he has taken the fever he goes at once to the hospital in Rio, not risking the change to the cool heights of Petropolis, lest he might not have strength to rally in the cold when the period of collapse comes. You say you would not live in a place where such a sword hung over your head, but they read New York and Chicago papers in July with records of hundreds of deaths from sunstroke while their temperature is hardly varying five degrees from seventy, and in February, when their fever is at its worst, they read the numbers of victims of pneumonia, grippe, diphtheria, and find the ills of life not so unevenly distributed after all. Men on salaries large enough to live in Petropolis need have little fear of yellow fever. But the missionaries in Rio, the secretaries of Y. M. C. A., Bible Society, etc., and the under-clerks of foreign establishments must have it once. How these men and women have nursed each other through the sharpness of the fever and the awful weakness afterwards! Do you wonder that friendships spring up under these circumstances between people who would hardly find their affinity at home?

Kipling voiced the spirit of such comradeship in a small community in a foreign land, when he wrote:

“I have eaten your bread and salt,
I have drunk your water and wine,
The deaths ye died I have watched beside
And the lives that ye lead were mine.

“Was there aught that I did not share,
In vigil, or toil, or ease,
One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?

“I have written the tale of our life,
For a sheltered people’s mirth,
In jesting guise--but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.”

SANTOS AND SOME BRAZILIANS.

Though you are so comfortable and happy in Petropolis with frequent excursions to Rio, you cannot leave Brazil without a trip to Santos and São Paulo. Perhaps you never heard of these places before you arrived, but now they are all-important. You recall “Santos” as a mark stuck in coffee-bags at your grocer’s at home. Here you know it is the port which ships the greatest amount of coffee to Europe and North America of any in the world--millions and millions of dollars’ worth. And São Paulo, a city of 200,000, is the capital of a great and wealthy state of the same name, lying up on the high table-land forty miles from Santos, its port.

You study the daily papers for a “_vapor_” (steamer) to take you these two hundred miles farther south, and find them due from every port in Europe, freighters with cabins for a few passengers. It is a rather rough voyage, but after twenty hours you round the island which lies in front of Santos, making the Santos “river” a quiet harbor.

Every flag flies in that harbor, but how the seamen hate it on account of the awful scourge of yellow fever six years ago, when forty or fifty vessels were abandoned there for lack of living crews to take them out. The sanitary conditions are improved since then, and you may safely sleep on the seashore near by, and go into town during the day. The stone quays are now fine. The narrow streets are laden with the odor of green coffee. Barefooted Portuguese and negroes are the beasts of burden. They walk rapidly up a gang-plank with two coffee-bags, each weighing one hundred and thirty-two pounds, on the two shoulders and meeting over the head; then, with a quick motion, dump the bags into the ship’s hold.

The bright-colored houses and the palms are like those you love in every Brazilian town. The women mostly sit in the windows, idle, ill-clad and untidy. The mountains climb abruptly behind the half-dozen streets. When you go to São Paulo you will climb those mountains by an English railway, starting from a good station.

By the station stands one of the oldest churches in Brazil, dating back perhaps to 1550, the Romish church of Saint Antonio. It contains a curious chapel, wainscoted high with blue and white tiles (Delft?) forming a panoramic picture. In the center of the chapel an image of Christ, with the heart exposed, has lines of rope running taut from the heart to the images of the saints grouped about him--“Will draw all men unto me.” It is very realistic, very crude, really revolting, but very illustrative also.

The island which shuts Santos from the vast Atlantic, stretching down towards the South Pole, has on its ocean side a succession of beaches each a mile or more in length separated by rocky promontories. In the most spacious of these _praias_ a Brazilian syndicate has built a “Brazilian Monte Carlo,” called Guaruja, consisting of hotel, cottages, a Catholic church with never a service in it, a theater, and a Casino where roulette was wont to be played every night and Sundays. If you stay at Santos you will find this spot safe from yellow fever, and your first twenty-four hours will convince you that you have found the climate of Paradise. You are at the edge of the south temperate zone. For weeks the temperature will not vary five degrees from seventy Fahr. day or night. The lines of nature are exquisite--the slopes of the hills, the curve of the smooth, hard, sandy beach. The air is soft to breathe.

The hotel is filled with large Brazilian families, some from the city of São Paulo, others from the great coffee plantations farther interior. They are typical wealthy Brazilians. Some have been sent by their doctors for sea-bathing. The number of baths is prescribed, and taken literally and seriously at six o’clock in the morning. Some have come for gaiety, relief from the monotony of life on a plantation. Some from São Paulo were “monarchists,” do not like the new republic, go to Paris where the Brazilian Princess holds a little court, and bring back French clothes which may enable you to take to New York some fashions in advance from the remote suburb of Santos!

A good quartet plays for dancing in the hotel _sala_ (parlor) every night, especially Sundays. The Casino is the next building, and a wail goes up because the state government, in what is considered an excess of virtue, has sent soldiers to prevent gambling there.

All the ladies speak French fluently and their piano-playing is brilliant. They use the time which we bestow upon “an all-round education” upon these accomplishments, and marry by the time they are sixteen. Some time they will go to Paris. Now they are over-run by their many little children, and usually look older than they really are.

You are puzzled to know who belongs to whom. The wife of Senhor de Couto is Dona Margarida. The mother of Senhor Antonio Prado is Dona Veridiana. The wife of the nation’s president, Campos Salles, is Dona Anna Gabriella. They might all be members of a royal family, or belong to the time of the patriarchs, so far as their use of names goes. When the narrow gauge train brings the papas at night to the front of the hotel there is pleasant excitement. The sons kiss the hands of their fathers respectfully. You will select the lawyers and doctors by the distinctive gem each wears in his ring, diamond or emerald. The barons are mostly owners of coffee plantations, and the many commissarios are the coffee factors who often advance much money “up country” to perfect and bring down the coffee to the port. You meet them all easily on the verandas or in the park which borders the beach.

The park itself deserves your interest; for the neighboring forests have yielded their palms, aloes and dragon’s blood to beautify it, and the little summer houses are thatched with blossoming air-plants all pink and green.

Your strong, good coffee and fresh French bread are brought to your bedroom at seven in the morning, and then, before the sun is unpleasantly strong, you have your walk on the beach after watching the little narrow gauge train start with the business men for Santos. At eleven you go to the dining-room for a four or five course breakfast. At four o’clock you will make your own tea on your spirit lamp and have some of Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits. (When the “biscuits” are eaten the box is just what you want to keep your kid gloves from mold and your gluey laces from being eaten by insects. I was not surprised to read of a British Bible Society making Bibles for Central Africa of a size and shape “to fit in biscuit boxes,” that they may be preserved from the ravages of ants, these biscuits being for sale in all such climates.) At five the Brazilians begin to dine. You wait till six, but some are still in the dining-room. You wonder at the parents, who give wine out of their own bottles to babies not more than two or three years old; and at the seven-year-old who invites a half dozen of her own age to dine with her on her birthday, and at the close of the meal has her health drunk in champagne by her mates with experienced clinking of glasses. You make a note of the little American boy five years old, lately arrived, who quickly learns the ways of the country. He asks his mother for a bag of marbles and some money. “What is the money for, my son?” “Why you can’t play marbles here unless you play for money,” says the wee man.

You watch the new arrivals and wonder what are the relationships in this big family--a father, two mothers, or aunts, or what? with those children. You soon appreciate the exalted place given to the godmother, and she it is who is neither aunt nor mother at that table--a law unto herself and them. Of course she is invited when the family comes to the seashore! I remember an Anglo-Brazilian gentleman once became very angry at this same hotel because he was not given a very good room, “and my _compadre_ (associate father, god-father of the son) the President of this hotel company!”

You watch the keen, unprincipled-looking boy just down from the great Jesuit school with whom the hotel manager is vexed “because he is such a little liar.”

You greet your neighbor on the veranda with good-day in Portuguese; then she speaks more of the same tongue but you shake your head. “_Parlez-vous Français?_” but there again you are soon beyond your depth, and at length one is found who speaks “a lit-tle English.” You have noticed this young woman before, a modest, bright, intelligent-looking girl, with an expression just a little different from all the others, evasive but of a more familiar type. “Where did you learn English?” you inquire. “At the Eschola Americana (American School), in São Paulo,” she replies; and you tell her you are going to that city very soon and to visit that school. You have found a friend, though a shy one; Brazilian girls keep well in the background, and next day when a box of flowers, oranges and sugar-cane comes down from her father’s fazenda, she brings you some camelias and tells you about the sugar-cane, though neither of you cares to chew it. It is for children, and “children of a larger growth.”

St. John’s Day comes at the end of June. It is one of the greatest of the many Romish holidays or _festas_. The “American schools”[4] do not close for saints’ days, indeed one is puzzled to think what other schools do with such constant interruptions and the overwhelming illiteracy is partially accounted for! They do close, however, for a ten days’ vacation at St. John’s Day, for it is midway from Christmas to Christmas and fits the school semesters. Dr. Lane, President of the “American schools” and college, and some of the teachers come down to Guaruja to rest, and you have many a quiet time to talk over their work with them, such as they could not well afford to give were they among their five hundred pupils. You enjoy seeing them meet old friends among these Brazilian families. You sit out on the veranda in the evening, while St. John is honored with fire-works (saints always have fire-works) and talk a little with the orphaned Scotch and Italian girls who have been brought to school and are being trained for teachers. They have all been under the weather. It has been forty-five degrees Fahrenheit up in São Paulo morning and evening for three weeks, a little too cold for a building with no heaters fiercer than little charcoal braziers, but the Brazilian children are accustomed to such winter temperatures, even though consumption has more victims than any other disease.

[4] “American Schools” were founded many years ago by a Presbyterian missionary and have maintained a high standard.

This is a holiday for business men as well as schools and the prevailing church.

A picnic to the bay of the second _praia_ is arranged. The islands boasts two carriages and you charter them for the ladies and the luncheon. The gentlemen go on horseback. You arrive at a rocky coast with no beach, no means of reaching the water’s edge. And there in sight of your picnic party are hundreds of huge turtles in the water! The question is proposed, “How much does one of those turtles weigh?” The inexperienced guess wildly from ten to forty pounds. A knowing one says they will average from one to three hundred! A French steamer is passing the island as you watch, and soon will round the lower end and make the Santos harbor, but she is well out from shore. You never see a little boat among those breakers. No one goes for turtles. If they were on our northern shores what would their lives be worth! but here living is too indolent to spend ingenuity on capturing turtles.

I must give you some reminiscences of older Guaruja. The town was created just at the close of the Columbian Exposition. The President of the syndicate visited the United States and bought the buildings for Guaruja, all pine, ready to put together. It looked like a section of Coney Island and very novel in that land of red-tiled roofs and plastered sides. A narrow-gauge railroad across the island and an electric light plant proved the enterprise of the company. Only three of the many sleeping-rooms in the hotel were lighted by electricity, however. They were arranged _en suite_ with a light in each, but only one switch, in the middle room, turned the three on and off. It was our drollest fun to tease the English couple who occupied one of the side rooms about the hour at which their neighbors sent them to bed. If there was a baby there they were plunged into darkness before nine. If there was a “quiet game” going on next door these poor victims must lie in a brilliant light until late. These two rooms lacked their own switches for more than a year to my knowledge.

Two words you easily learn with their depths (or lengths) of meaning are, _paciencia_, patience, and _amanha_, to-morrow (which means some other time, probably no other time).

If you wish to hear an uproarious laugh listen to any one familiar with Brazil hearing for the first time Kipling’s:

“Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle
the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, and he
weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: ‘A fool lies here who tried to
hustle the East.’”

Life in Santos--now at high pressure, then idle--now pitiless to one’s neighbor, then tender as a brother--now mastering business knowledge of the ports and exchanges of the world as if such accuracy were all-important, then comes a whirl of speculation in exchange which seems to take all value out of special expert knowledge--life in Santos is evasive to one who would portray it faithfully. It seems difficult to express more than half the truth at one time. If one lives there a month the personal histories will all be familiar to him, and a like time on the Praça (Exchange) will acquaint him with the business characteristics of every firm. It is easy to learn things on the ground, to get a just and appreciative knowledge of excellencies and difficulties which is not readily transferrable. There are not only facts which can be stated, but a spirit of the place and people as necessary to know as the facts.

CONSULAR SERVICE AT SANTOS.

While these reminiscences of our life in Santos and Guaruja in 1895 and ’96 are uppermost, a figure comes to my mind which deserves your knowledge. It was still painfully near the horrible epoch of yellow fever developed by dredging for the new quays. That was why we all slept at Guaruja, the Barra, São Vicente, or São Paulo, even though daily coffee, banking or navigation business must be prosecuted in Santos. Such living was and is expensive, very.

At this time the United States saw fit to pay her consul in Santos $1,600 a year, since raised to $2,700, without allowance for office rent and expenses. The port cleared eight to ten millions of dollars’ worth of coffee per annum for the United States, and a large import business was opening up. The barest existence at Guaruja, or other healthful suburbs, for a single man, with daily transportation to Santos, cost $1,500 in gold. But one man could be found to try the service of our government for this State, and he was an Alabama negro. He was presumably an immune from yellow fever. At any rate, his income necessitated his sleeping in his office in Santos, and when even such undignified economies left him short of funds, he borrowed of the American merchants. A U.S. cruiser anchored off shore. The U.S. Consul and American citizens were invited on board. Tide and conditions made it necessary for the “tars” to carry the guests ashore on their backs through water about waist deep. The lieutenant in charge prophesied too sure an accident to do other than advise the consul to wade ashore on his own feet.

This black man did the routine work of the office, earned more than he received, and left in debt. Merchants, as consular agents, have filled emergencies for the government. The lack of a living salary for a good man as consul in a difficult but important port is the point I wish to make clear.

The British government rates this as a first-class consulate; salary, £1,500, nearly seventy-five hundred dollars. Offices for him in both Santos and São Paulo are maintained at government expense. Each year here counts for two in his required term of service, and at the end of the service his pension is based on the salary of the port. Of course he has been trained to the consular service.

The British Consul when we were in Guaruja had just come from ten years’ service in Mediterranean ports, a gentleman of intelligence, elegance, refinement and courtesy. His regalia always adjusted to a nicety to the diplomatic requirements of the occasion, be it a wedding ceremony, a Queen’s birthday dinner, a reception or a funeral, provoked smiles from the Americans. Even the flower in his buttonhole artistically harmonized or contrasted with the shade of velvet of his lapels and cuffs.

During his first year the worst of “the fever” was in the shipping. Sailors from British ships came to his office in all stages of it. With his own hands he steadied the tottering sick ones, sent them to the hospital, and knew of his own knowledge that they were being taken care of. When they died he collected their pay from the ship-masters and saw that their money and effects reached their relatives at home. He received while we were there a letter of thanks from an American mother, whose boy, a sailor on an English ship, had died in Santos. He had collected his pay and sent home his kit. The mother sent him money to erect a stone over her son’s grave.

His systematic exercises were a daily swim in the ocean, followed by a three-mile walk on the beach in the early morning, and two miles more when the business day was done, thus maintaining his best health and vigor in tropical conditions.

The engineer and purser of a British Royal Mail steamer came out to Guaruja while their ship lay in port. Neither could swim, but both went for baths in the sea. The current caught one who was drowning, and the consul rescued him in a seething surf after a struggle to the point of exhaustion. Reaching the shore, he discovered the other, a very heavy man, was being carried rapidly out to sea. He swam after him, but found him dead from sudden apoplexy, and brought his body ashore. He received a medal from the Royal Humane Society of England for his action.

These were contemporary consuls at Santos and for the great and rich State of São Paulo.

The American Manufacturers’ Excursion to Brazil and the Argentine took place that year for the purpose of promoting trade. Governments fêted them. Papers and magazines chronicled their movements. Only the very sad death of one of their number prevented their completing their plan of coming to the important port of Santos and being received by the representative from Alabama.

To the most of the American merchants their consul was “that ---- nigger.” To the British Consul he was always the representative of the U. S., and an individual in a trying and poverty-stricken position, and treated with corresponding courtesy and sympathy.

En route to Brazil we saw posted in the Oxford, England, post-office, a notice warning all emigrants against going to Brazil until they had consulted the Home Office.

A few months later we saw a steamer crowded with emigrants from Canada enter the Santos harbor. The State of São Paulo had sent out a statement of the need of agriculturalists. Misunderstanding of needs and conditions had brought about five hundred poor Canadians to this “Land of Warmth and Sunshine,” knowing nothing of agriculture, half-skilled in some trades, or well-skilled in trades useless in Brazil. The State fed them in barracks for a while, tried them on interior plantations, returned them to the barracks, tried to obtain other employment, but mostly to no avail. They sickened. Their feet festered with jiggers. They could not speak Portuguese. They were helpless. The British Consul had to send them home by twos, threes, tens, and scores, on tramp steamers, sailing-vessels--any way that they could work their passage or that he could secure the money to pay the passage of the women and children.

A letter from an American in São Paulo, dated July 6th, 1900, says:

“What does our government mean by sending out an Italian Priest as Consul to Santos? If he were only a priest who had practically withdrawn from active functions, it would not be so bad; but this one makes it his first duty to visit the newspapers and declare that he will not allow the duties of the consulate to interfere with his higher ecclesiastical functions, and, as proof of this, he left the duties of the office yesterday and came up to say a 30th day Mass for the soul of a person connected with the _Diario Popular_, and had it advertised far and near.”

THE CITY OF SÃO PAULO.

There is one train up from Santos to São Paulo at dawn and one after business hours. A coffee merchant has extended the courtesy of the club-car which daily brings and returns the bankers and merchants of this busy but sickly port. Half the men in this car are Brazilian, some of pure Portuguese descent, others with strains of African or Indian blood; the remainder are German, English and American. The journey takes two hours and a half, so they proceed to play poker, with a few exceptions, who prefer chess or cribbage, or have a big “home mail.” They are all too accustomed to these beautiful mountains to look out of the windows as you do, except to count coffee cars and estimate to-morrow’s receipts. You see many air-plants lodged among the trees with spikes of pink blossoms, which look like hyacinths at a little distance. Close by you would think the hyacinth much prettier and like its fragrance better. The tropical forest is an impenetrable thicket. You see the face of it only. A car going up the mountain must be attached to a cable weighted at the other end by a balancing car going down the parallel track. In this way passengers and thousands of carloads of coffee are transported by three successive, long, steep inclines. At the top you wait until all the cars of your train are cabled up; the train is joined and starts for São Paulo, over level, open country.

Judging from the din of porters and carriages at the station, São Paulo is very much alive. The hotel is in the midst of stores. You are taken to a suite of two huge rooms and asked a great price. You had said you wanted one room. Argument ensues. The rooms belong together. You affirm that you will have but one. There is no access to the farther room but through yours; would you afflict the hotel? You persist in taking the one, and at night hear voices in the other and know the owners found their resting-place by some other door than yours. That was only a white lie. That’s nothing!

After dinner you rest in an Austrian bentwood chair (the universally prized furniture, with no upholstery for insects and dampness, nor joints which come unglued), and read your lesson; for in traveling one reads all the available literature about the place one is visiting. It is little in English you have found about the city of São Paulo. You know it is now the educational center of all Brazil: that it is more than three hundred years old, with 200,000 people; that it has furnished two Presidents for the new republic, and many statesmen; that it has a charming mingling of tropical and temperate climates: that England, France and Germany have the import business rather than the United States.

Coming down on the steamer you became deeply interested in all you heard of it. A nobleman, who shared his Emperor’s banishment ten years ago when the republic began, was making a brief visit to his old home. One day he said very sadly to some American people of Brazilian experience: “What do you think of my country since the republic?” The gentlemen replied: “It has improved in many ways.” The Count said: “You are republicans, of course; yet is not my country very different from yours?” “Yes, _because there has been no education of the common people, and they have not been accustomed to self-control_.” Then an outline of what American missionary schools are trying to do for all grades, “gentle and simple,” in this city, was given, to his great surprise.[5]

[5] See Appendix.

Here are items you find in your reading:

“Less than thirty years ago it was common for men to lock their wives and daughters securely in the upper story when they went to business, or if absent for any length of time to deliver them to a convent for safekeeping. No respectable woman could go alone on the streets of any of the large towns.

“The story of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba is the story of Brazil and all countries where Rome has held undisturbed sway. In the seventeen and one-half millions of Roman Catholic Brazilians there is 82 per cent. of illiteracy and an enormous per cent. of illegitimacy and crime.

“The first missionaries of the Presbyterian Board landed in Brazil in 1860. Every avenue to knowledge was held by the State Church and the Jesuits had control. Private schools were subject to priestly inspection. Protestantism was fiercely opposed by State, Church and people. Men who dared to preach the Gospel publicly, risked their lives.”

In 1885, their schools had been opened fifteen years. “Under the influence of Protestantism, or at any rate coincident with the growth of Presbyterian schools and churches in Brazil, new and more liberal educational laws were enacted. Influences were at work in society which in the near future were to abolish slavery, overthrow monarchy, set up a government of the people and separate Church from State.”

In 1889 “Mackenzie College” was begun. In 1890 their record stands: “A boys’ boarding school, a girls’ boarding school, and a day school in the rua São João, with thirteen rooms for teaching purposes--a normal department with four rooms, all full to overflowing--an enrolment of four hundred and forty-seven pupils in all grades from kindergarten to high school. Eighteen primary schools in different parts of the field with an efficient corps of native teachers, and a self-supporting manual training school.”

The report up to date (1900) is: “The enrolment for the year was 546, with a very high average attendance. There were 339 Brazilians, 48 Germans, 38 Italians, 18 Americans, 14 French, 12 English and 17 of other nationalities. Roman Catholics, 427; Protestants, 117; Israelites, 2. This completes the twenty-ninth year of the school and the tenth year of the college.” A footnote explains that the numbers have not grown the last few years because there is not an inch more room to put a pupil in.

The Rev. Geo. W. Chamberlain was the founder of these schools. At the beginning boys and girls had not been accustomed to meet each other with any freedom. Evil was very evil and very universal. A Brazilian General of high rank, and the last Governor of the province of São Paulo under Emperor Dom Pedro, General Couto Magelhaes (Magellan, a descendant of the old explorer), later became Mr. Chamberlain’s friend, and begged for more American teachers and a larger school for _co-education_!! as he had now seen it developed. Indeed he said, “The only hope of Brazil lies in such co-educational schools.” Query. Did Prof. Agassiz plant the germ of this thought when they went up the Amazon together?

Next day you take a carriage and try to get a general sense of the town. You have heard the State of São Paulo called the “New England of Brazil.” But if you call the city of São Paulo the Boston, the difference is most apparent. The narrow, crooked streets are similar, but the buildings are like those in all Spanish and Portuguese towns.

As you go down the poorer streets, one word comes to you at every turn of your eye, “unclean”--the children, the grown-ups, the houses, the streets, even the emblem of the Holy Spirit which an appointed solicitor of his parish church carries while he begs funds for the celebration of the annual holiday of this member of the Trinity. When I saw one of these I mistook it at a little distance for a pole with a cast-off bonnet on top--a cluster of dilapidated artificial flowers and a bird. Investigation proved the latter a dove!

While many streets are lined with one-story hovels, there are many broad and quite well-paved thoroughfares, and you see these with pleasure. Solid walls higher than your head shut most of the pretty gardens from view, but you get glimpses of comfortable one and two-story houses, the bright colors soft and pleasing. Now and then the Portuguese style is supplanted by the French mansard, and you may guess the owner has been to Paris. Indeed, if he travels far in any direction, he must go on horseback, or on the Atlantic.

Gas, electric lights, street-car lines, sewers, public buildings, and parks, all add to the comfort of living in this old metropolis.

You drive through the finest part of town on your way to the Avenida (Boulevard) and to see the modern reservoir with fine water-works, and isolating hospital, just built by an ambitious government. On the slope of the ridge up which you drive, you see for a long distance a plain, square, substantial three-story, buff brick structure. “What is that?” “Mackenzie College.” In this city of ornate architecture and brilliant coloring this solid plainness is nearly droll. But it is just so much more noticeable. Everybody knows Mackenzie College. The low, insufficient dormitory, house for little boys, manual training shop and President’s dwelling dot the campus, not a foot of which can be spared to be sold if only they can get money to build a dormitory. Descending to the town again you pass the new Government Normal School building and go to see the teachers at the São João school. Plain brick again. Heavy wall around the grounds. What a bee-hive inside! You go through one full schoolroom after another with Miss Scott. The children are so well disciplined they scarcely notice you. The faces are pretty and bright. What surprises you most are the exquisite writing of the young Brazilian teachers on the black-boards, the order and attention in every room whether governed by American teachers or Brazilian who have been trained here, the devotion of the wee new scholars to Miss Baxter and the perfect cleanliness, system and good food which Miss Munson secures. Surely Dr. Lane and Miss Scott, who guide this combination day and girls’ boarding-school, ought to be happy, thankful and proud, and the men and women in the U. S. whose gifts have made this school a possibility ought to be grateful also. The children come from families of the rich and the poor, of title and missionaries, of many nationalities, and differing religious belief. But the mental and moral discipline has challenged the attention of the Government to such an extent that it has been building several remarkable buildings for schools, and teachers trained in this “American School” have been invited to assist in developing the work in them. Many are the tales you will be told, while you stay, of a Boston school-ma’am who was lent by the American school to inaugurate the first years of work in the new Government Normal School. The question of Bible and religion in the Government schools is the same in São Paulo and Chicago, but the other religious opportunities and influences are not the same. If any education of our Protestant type is given to Brazilian youth (not sectarian, but Protestant) it cannot be left to Brazilian fostering. Infidelity, spiritualism, and materialism abound.

When Sunday comes you can choose between three Protestant services, two Presbyterian and one Methodist, all in Portuguese, or the Church of England service in English. Perhaps you prefer to go early to mass. There is ample opportunity for that, and then the day would be a free holiday, so says the majority in the city.

You may go to the Catholic cemetery on high ground, commanding a fine view of the city. In the thick wall surrounding it are receiving cells for coffins, which can be rented for varying lengths of time. It is a reproduction of such a place in Spain, the West Indies or New Orleans, including the durable wreaths of flowers made of metal, of bisque or of beads, often also photographs under glass. Women never go to a funeral. The hearses and coffins are of brilliant colors, purple, or scarlet, or yellow, and gold.

You must watch the people come and go at the hotel and amuse yourself again with their trunks. Here is a complete set of French ones--real Louis Vuittons made for every sort of contents, even one for the huge tin wash-pan which will be used for my lady’s clothes. How long since you had seen a real old-time “hair-trunk,” i. e., a trunk covered with calf-skin with its hair on! Here they are, studded with brass nails, initials and all! But the tin trunks were the drollest, till you finally bought one yourself and found how well it kept out dampness. The tin ones are all sizes and all colors--decorated. Yours is a nice bright blue, with red roses painted in a stiff bunch on top.

You are rapidly learning the value of sunshine in damp climates. You hang out your clothing and shoes at least once a week in the hot sun until the particles of mold are entirely dry, so they will not be pasty, then brush them thoroughly. Your gloves you buy, without metal buttons, which discolor, only a few at a time, and keep them with lumps of dry ammonia in a tight glass jar or tin biscuit box. You do not trim your dresses with steel. That would rust. When you buy a new hat-pin it has a gilt or brass, not a steel, pin. You keep an eye to your needles and scissors.

A few insects will give you something to talk about when you reach home, but they are not much more troublesome than home-pests.

The flea (_pulga_) takes the place of mosquitoes. He does not keep you awake with singing, and if you compel careful cleaning of your rooms and do not cherish vagabond dogs you will not find him a serious trial after the first fortnight or so. I do not know whether it was a truth spoken in jest or how to characterize the assertion of an old resident who said that his own home fleas never bit him. It was only in other people’s houses that he suffered. One does at least seem to grow bite-proof.

A borachuda bite is more rare but more interesting. He looks like a feeble baby fly. He bites your hand in the shadow, on the sly, and the spot indurates besides inflaming, and lasts longer than the other sorts of bite, but is not serious.

The barata is like a huge cockroach. He loves leather, shoes, traveling bags, passe-partouts, book-bindings. Starch and glue are also acceptable articles of diet to him. With strict housekeeping he is banished. You see how convenient a tin trunk will be if you really travel in all sorts of places, to protect a few of your valuables, now and then.

Now you know the worst there is to know, unless it may be the early puzzles of an American housekeeper here. First as to ice. You can get some if you will, but most people do not. It is considered most unwholesome to drink ice-water. I cannot myself see the superiority of an evaporating water-jar of porous terra cotta, for it has a slender neck and could only be rinsed, never washed and absolutely cleansed, I should think. I admit the chill of the ice-water may be bad in yellow-fever regions. Most people and most shops have no refrigerators. Meat is eaten the day it is killed, and is called _carne verde_, green meat. This is the tempting label on butchers’ carts. I remember going to dine with a lady who was a fine housekeeper. The turkey was as tender as one from Rhode Island or Philadelphia. I asked the secret. She said that before it was killed that morning she had fed it whisky until it staggered.

Every house of pretension has its “dispense,” or locked closet, from which the housekeeper every morning counts out or weighs out exactly what is to be used by the cook for the meals of the day. The cook usually goes to market, being able to beat down the prices to the proper point with better grace than the presiding genius of the house. Besides he or she can bring home the purchases in a basket, and there is no further doubt as to whether the article purchased is the one delivered. The great markets are worth a visit. You will go at least to the chief one, in the heart of town, in a great, light market-building which would be a credit anywhere.

You visit an English bride who came with her new husband on your steamer, and is to live in São Paulo. Her wedding presents have been delayed in the custom house, and are but just received after paying duties the equal of $400, in American money! It was only the usual collection of gifts to the average bride, but the duties are excessive on silverware and on any bric-à-brac or furniture having gilt mountings. Fabrics and even rugs are dutiable by weight. You have lifted an Oriental rug. She had one. She also had, unfortunately, a whole “bolt of American muslin”--too close-woven and heavy for Brazilian customs. She is trying to decide whether her _sala_ shall be altogether British or partly Brazilian in arrangement. An afternoon tea-table will seem like home to her. She settles upon bentwood furniture, cane-seated of course, and arranges sofa and chairs with elastic reference to Brazilian custom. The sofa occupies a prominent place, two mate armchairs face each other at right angles to the sofa, making three sides of a conversational square, nicely accommodating four persons. The genuine Brazilian would go on adding to the two chairs at least two more on either side of the sofa. His guest would take the chair farthest from the sofa while waiting for the host, and a seat on the sofa at the end of the aisle of chairs would be the high honor which could be extended by the host when he comes in.

She has an oil-stove, too, which is an occasional comfort in the cool evening or on a rainy day when even an umbrella will not dry.

Her handsome mahogany furniture is a comparative trial here, for the Brazilians have a cheaper hard wood of the same color from which many ordinary articles are made, and some other would have been far more elegant, black walnut for instance!

You are by this time entirely accustomed to the universal toothpick, smoothly made of orangewood, really a perfection of a toothpick; for every Brazilian has used one at intervals throughout every meal on the steamer and at hotels since you left Lisbon; also to the universal cigarette, welcome in dining-room and salon. You also find that they hold American dentists in high esteem, and there are several good ones in Petropolis, Rio and São Paulo.

Walking down the street men lift their hats as they pass each Romish church. Every sort of package is carried on porters’ heads, and the colored porters often fall into a rhythmical walk or trot as peculiar to them as the flourish of a black waiter in a restaurant in America.

A pleasant invitation comes to you to attend the English cricket match, a gay affair, with plenty to eat--and drink.

I remember while I was in São Paulo one cool July day talking over the news of the last package of New York _Heralds_ (the paper, or its Paris edition, taken largely by American exiles in Brazil), with an Anglo-Brazilian friend. We had been discussing the unwholesomeness of ice. I showed her the subscription list to the “_Herald_ Ice Fund for the Poor of New York City!” She could only think it $10,000 misplaced! So true is it that one needs really to live in a given climate or place to really appreciate its requirements.

Frequently, evenings, there is a blaze of fireworks for saints you do not know. One day you are invited to go with a party to the “Penha,” one of the Madonna festivals, perhaps the greatest one here. It is celebrated a little distance from town, with scores of roulette wheels, and the people save their earnings for some time to gamble there to their hearts’ content.

When I was in São Paulo a General Conference of Methodist missionaries convened. The men had come from long distances, several of them remote from railroad or seaboard. I went to their farewell meeting. It was held in a plain, whitewashed room. We were seated on long benches. There was little modern style about the garments or evidence of high living in the cheeks or eyes. Bishop Granbery presided with gentle dignity. Dr. Morrison made the address. He began by quoting the text, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” Looking about with a quiet, half-sarcastic smile, he said: “Brethren, I do not think any one will accuse any one here of laying up treasures on earth. Let us talk about treasures in heaven. Any of you who has found a poor, ignorant, debased soul here, and has patiently put his own life beside that life, and taught and developed and strengthened that life by God’s help so that it is purer, holier, more Christlike, will find some treasure laid up in heaven. It will be the difference between that soul as he found it and what it becomes.” I have had many occasions to recall that bit of sermon in my knowledge of American missionaries and their helpful work in Brazil, and so, I believe, will you.

It will always be a pleasure to remember the hospitality of both merchants and missionaries. Before leaving São Paulo, you must accept the offer of Dr. Lane, President of Mackenzie College, to go through not only his own preparatory classes and college, where you will find the first working laboratory for chemistry in a Brazilian school and the first manual training school, as well as plenty of classic Portuguese, Latin, and other things, but go through the Government schools as well, where he is always an honored guest. Then go to Cantareira with Prof. Orville A. Derby, the eminent Government geologist, and the young professors of the college. It is an easy day’s excursion to the source of the water supply for the city. A train of open cars takes you through old gardens of roses, and out to the mountain streams, enclosed by first-rate engineering, and filtered and reservoired amid gardens and masonry most attractive. You can study a coffee-tree (or bush) of your own height, with shiny green leaves and bright red cherries, the pits of which are two coffee-beans lying with their flat sides together, and recall the enthusiastic description of a man who has just returned from a trip to a great coffee plantation in the interior.

“As one rides on horseback between the rows of coffee-trees his head is hardly visible above them. Call to mind the hedgerows of England, stretch them in straight, long lines with just room between for the pickers. A space twenty-five feet wide between every hundred rows is a road for carts, but there are no cross streets. Starting from the edge of the fazenda (plantation) quite rapid riding for two hours brings one to the center view from a dome-shaped hill. In all directions as far as the eye can see there is nothing but coffee trees. The only visible ground is the deep red earth of the streets separating each hundred rows. It is a rolling prairie of living green, on a colossal scale. Two months earlier the blossoms covered it ‘like a white sheet.’ A little later this green will be brilliant with red cherries, the branches heavily weighted down by the fruit. This fazenda has 1,600,000 bearing coffee trees. The next has nearly 4,000,000 trees and is the largest in the world. Now I understand how this State produces more coffee even in a bad year than all the rest of the world outside of Brazil combined. Its possibilities in a good year are nearly double the crops other than those of Brazil. The quality is altogether finer than that known in the United States as Rio. This is what has brought English and German capital, increased the population of the city of São Paulo to 200,000 from 60,000 in 1884, and made the commerce of Santos what it is. Italians and Germans both work on these plantations and the one I have just described, which I have just visited, has fifteen hundred people living on the fazenda and constantly employed. The larger plantation, ‘the Fazenda Dumont,’ had a railroad of some twenty miles for use on the plantation, and its connecting line running through the ‘Fazenda Schmidt,’ was used by Mr. Schmidt, my hospitable host, for shipping his coffee to the trunk line and so on down to Santos.”

HOMEWARD BOUND.

It is October. You choose to leave here before it grows too warm. The young spring buds are already adding their delicate green to the darker old foliage.

Rio is reached by rail in fourteen hours. You would like to go home in one of the great New Zealand steamers which makes the round trip from London to London in ninety days, and which always carries charming passengers for the whole voyage by Suez, New Zealand, Straits of Magellan, Rio de Janeiro, Madeira, London. Everybody here knows what variety is provided by this journey, not only of interesting sights in port, but of amusement of every description at sea. They also know when one of these steamers has arrived by the unwonted varieties of game, vegetables, and well-hung beef and mutton in the markets.

No. You decide to go directly to New York, for you have come by way of England, so sail on the “Wordsworth.” Even she is English and there is no longer an American Line. You will touch at Bahia, Pernambuco, and St. Lucia, one of the West Indies, and see New York harbor in twenty-four days from Rio.

Bahia you saw hurriedly on the way down, but it looks even more attractive as you approach it the second time. It is invested with some added interest, also, since learning that the court came here from Portugal for shelter in Napoleonic times; and that this city has always been the center of Jesuitical influence.

The Bahian blacks, a finer race of negroes than you have ever seen, and said to have been Mohammedans, make a very strong impression now. They are physically superb. The low-necked, short-sleeved linen garment worn by the women is frequently beautified with “drawn-work.” The great strings of gold beads around their necks are their substitute for a bank account, for banks are not a convenience to a people who cannot read.

The Bahian oranges are like the finest Floridas, and far superior to any others you have had. Bananas are everywhere the food of the poor, and not better than are for sale at home, and other tropical fruits have been a disappointment.

At Pernambuco you find you own the wonderful reef, and the pine-apples, and the catamarans; for have you not seen them before, and do they not now prove themselves old friends and permanent possessions!

The next many days are a repetition of your former oceanic, tropical temperatures, with far fewer passengers, and less ceremony, perhaps. The sea, however, seems trying to compensate you for other lacks by furnishing interesting creatures for you to watch. There are numberless flying fish, frightened from the water by your ship, and the delicate, little, pink “Portuguese men-of-war,” as the sailors call them, go dancing by on the surface of the water in tantalizing beauty. Do not be sorry that you cannot get one, for, trailing from that shining pink bladder, there are processes which sting like nettles.

For a few days you seem almost to be crossing a wheat-field as you take a long look across the water yellow with gulf-weed which has been thrown off by the gulf stream and floats at rest on this quiet sea. Take a fish line and catch some pretty branches, look at the little fruit which grows upon them and gives the name, grapes, to the sea. It is called by its Spanish form the Sargasso Sea.