Chapter I: Part 1

A SUMMER JOURNEY
TO BRAZIL

By Alice R. Humphrey

“To the general American public Brazil is a _terra incognita_.
Less is known of it than of Asia, Africa, the distant islands
of the sea, or even of the North Pole.”

“I asked no other thing,
No other was denied.
I offered Being for it;
The mighty merchant smiled.

Brazil? He twirled a button,
Without a glance my way:
‘But, madam, is there nothing else
That we can show to-day?’”
EMILY DICKINSON.

NEW YORK
BONNELL, SILVER & CO.
LONDON: 4 TRAFALGAR SQUARE

1900

COPYRIGHT, 1900, by

BONNELL, SILVER & CO.

_All rights reserved_

Press of E. Scott Co., New York

CONTENTS.

PAGE

New York to Lisbon 1

Two Weeks in Tropical Seas 11

Pernambuco 20

Two Beautiful Bays 26

Petropolis 40

Santos and Some Brazilians 51

Consular Service at Santos 65

The City of São Paulo 72

Homeward Bound 96

APPENDIX.

An American System of Schools 102

Religious Instruction in Schools 112

Facts about Brazil 118

The Samaritan Hospital 122

Brazilian Naval Revolt Ended by U. S. Protection
of her own Merchant Ships 124

Roman Catholic Church in Brazil as a State
Church and as Related to Protestantism 141

1864 and 1900 147

John T. Mackenzie 148

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

Map of Two Hemispheres 1

Place du Commerce, Lisbon 6

Harbor, St. Vincent, Cape Verd Islands 14

Cable Station, St. Vincent 16

Reef, Pernambuco 20

President of Brazil.--Wife of President 32

Docks and Arsenal, Rio de Janeiro 34

Petropolis 40

Alley of Palms 48

Map of the State of São Paulo 50

Railway Station, Santos 52

Hotel and Park, Guaruja 62

Mackenzie College 68

Government Normal School Building 82

Coffee Picking 95

Coffee Washing 98

Coffee Drying 106

Blacks of Bahia 120

PREFACE

Experiences indicated in these pages are not merely incidental and exceptional but prove by repeated journeys to be really characteristic.

We first visited the Empire of Brazil when Dom Pedro was at his best; then in the critical period following the revolution; last when the era of discord had culminated and the first _civilian_ President was peacefully elected. The short but severe apprenticeship in self government transformed a Latin Empire into a settled Republic in eight years. Now for three years the rapid advance in things which pertain to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” has been so quiet and steady as to pass unnoticed.

The eleven years’ history of this sister Republic is full of hope for Porto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines. The New York Evening Post, June 26th, 1900, says: “Under republican institutions individual effort has been stimulated and rapid development has gone forward in the wilds of the Amazon as it has in the coast regions of Brazil.” _But nearly six years of military government were necessary before it was practicable to elect a civilian President._

The English expectation of a collapse of a Brazilian Republic was not given up until about 1896.

Great Britain’s equipment for _ruling other nations_ is so far in advance of the United States that any thought of our copying her methods is as absurd as it would be to expect England to set up a self-governing Republic. The St. James Gazette of June 26th, 1900 expresses the opinion that China is “teaching America the impossibility of a great trading nation avoiding Imperialism,” and adds “America’s experience will teach her that it is not the desire to grab distant lands, but unavoidable destiny that drives Great Britain ever forward. Washington has no choice but to protect the imperilled American citizens and having once interfered in China to protect her interests she will never be able to shake from her shoes the dust of the Celestial Empire.” When Edwin H. Conger was Minister to Brazil the United States in protecting American shipping ended the Brazilian Republic’s most serious revolt. _But the United States interference in Brazilian affairs went no further._

Little as the United States has otherwise done for Brazil the expressed feeling is “Our greatest wish is to model the new Brazilian Republic according to the Constitution of the United States and to develop and consolidate our friendship and commercial relations with that incomparable Nation.”

H. M. H.

PLAINFIELD, N. J.
AUGUST, 1900.

A SUMMER JOURNEY TO BRAZIL.

NEW YORK TO LISBON.

Five winters in succession without one summer is an experience which I recall with pleasure these hot days! How did I manage it? Just crossed the equator to Brazil in May, back to New York in November, down to Brazil in May again and back once more in October.

Many people “who loved geography when they were young” have still no realizing sense of the reversal of the seasons south of the equator, and do not know how interesting a voyage they might easily make if they went “up and down in the world,” instead of going around it.

Everybody who is fortunate enough to have the money to do it has treated himself or some of his family to a trip around the world, and missionaries and commercial men have added to the list until we all speak with familiarity of life and travels in China and Japan, India and Egypt; but what American ever started for a pleasure trip to the southern half of his own hemisphere! Why not?

I have gone there by two different ways, and for variety recommend them both. Suppose you go in May--as you can most comfortably and with the largest number of new experiences--by way of the American Line to Southampton, England; thence, sailing from that same Southampton harbor, to Rio de Janeiro by the English Royal Mail Line. You find yourself leaving England in a good-sized, well-built steamer named for some river, “Nile,” “Danube,” “Magdalena,” or “Clyde,”--let us say the “Nile,”--and evidently made for different seas from the North Atlantic. Your cabin may be 7 × 10 feet, its walls on the gangway made of slats like blinds slightly open for ventilation; and the wide decks covered with permanent awnings suggest a summer veranda. This line of steamers makes the trip from England to Buenos Ayres in twenty-four days, and winter and summer they must heat the cabins at one end of the trip for the comfort of the passengers; for at one end it is winter if at the other you find summer. You will arrive at Rio de Janeiro at the end of seventeen days.

Out of the English Channel, stopping at Cherbourg for a few passengers from Paris, across the Bay of Biscay, it takes from Friday morning till Sunday to reach the quaint Spanish harbor of Vigo. Perhaps, so far, there will have been in the ship’s company one or two wine merchants who now leave for Oporto. Here you will receive your first instalment of emigrants, Spanish peasants, going to the Argentine Republic, the women with black hair and eyes and the most brilliant colors in their clothes. They may have nothing on their feet but their heads will be tied in kerchiefs, suggestive of a tulip-bed for hues.

You wish with your careful American training that a dignified old English steamship line would not regularly plan to spend that first Sunday in such a heathenish port, loading and unloading freight and taking on such irreligious-looking passengers. There is no service for you but what you make for yourself, and you look on with a painful sense that the great outside world is different from your gentle home, and go down to your room and get your Bible and try to think while the hoisting apparatus outside is lifting bumping boxes out of lighters and creaking them down into the hold, and scores of little boats full of Spanish vendors are screaming their fruits and earthenware or helping their poor countrymen into the steerage of your ship.

You wonder if “Boss Tweed” really enjoyed life here up to the time when Nast’s cartoon strayed into the town and inspired the authorities to report the discovered “child-stealer.”

One lesson you may learn from the foreign conditions of the day--to sympathize more sensitively with the daily life of our Lord spent among people who did not think as He did.

One day more and you anchor off Lisbon. Of course you will make one of a party with some of your shipmates, hire a boat and go ashore, a mile or more of rowing or sailing. How pretty the cream-colored city looks in her green palms! and how substantial the great stone quays! You hire a guide and go to drive. You get an impression of ornate public buildings and memorial statues, of narrow business streets with numberless insignificant shops, of the broader avenues of thick-walled, stuccoed, gay-colored residences, standing low and square in heavy shrubberies, of the Botanical Garden which no well regulated Portuguese city could be without and which here lies on the brow of a hill looking over the town; and now you know you must have your luncheon, and find a good one at a hotel. The semi-tropical life is comfortable behind “the Venetians,” and you have been getting glimpses of pretty courts through open corridors.

Now you must try to think what best use you can make of the remaining hour before you must cross the Place du Commerce, or Black Horse Square as the English call it, looking out on the harbor and surrounded the other three sides by government offices and custom-house, with spacious arcades, a triumphal arch, and bronze statue of Joseph I., then pick your way down the wet stone steps to the little boat which will row you out to your ship.

But where shall you go _for one hour_? Down to the dirty, narrow, old, Moorish quarter? No. Out to the church and palace of Belem built on the site whence Vasco de Gama embarked in 1500, and now containing the tombs of that explorer and of the great poet, Camoens (whom many readers will also connect with Macao, China). No that’s too far and too interesting for a mere hour. So is its neighboring tower in which the peerages of Portugal and her colonies are kept, and which looked so picturesque from the steamer, Moorish architecture in yellow brick. Can you go to see what the irreverent traveler calls “the dried kings” in the fine church of San Vicente de Fora, where you may see the remains of royalty of the line of Braganza preserved in glass coffins? Can you go to the beautiful suburb of Cintra, the summer resort of the nobility, the favorite of the English residents? No, it is fourteen miles away, through orange groves, and up, up from two to three thousand feet.

I remember when we were seeing the sights of Lisbon we had one very entertaining man in our little party who proved to be an American missionary in Brazil. He had been over this ground before, and seemed never to forget anything. He told us the story of a Lady Bountiful, blessing the poor with her generosity, no other than our old fellow-countrywoman of Woman’s Rights’ fame, Victoria Woodhull, now married and living near Lisbon. Indeed she is a very great lady, said the tale, and very gracious to American visitors.

But no! It would require too much time to see any sights more than the marvelous pictures of three scenes in the life of our Lord, done in Rome in mosaic after Raphael, Michael Angelo and Guido Reni, which we find in a small chapel in the church of San Roque in the heart of the city. About 1740 King John V. had this alcove or chapel made in Rome. He was a devoted Romanist, had been enriched by the discovery of the gold and diamond mines of Brazil, so this could be very costly in mosaic, bronze, porphyry, lapis lazuli, etc. It was set up in St. Peter’s in Rome and the Pope celebrated the first mass in it, then it became one of the treasures of Lisbon.

And now you are again on the ship. You look at beautiful Lisbon and know that if it had not been for Brazil you would never have seen it. It has been so easily reached from England on this steamer, but what an interminable journey it would have been by rail! Spain seems far enough away when one is traveling “on the Continent,” but Portugal! Indeed, this enterprising, seafaring, colonizing country of three hundred years ago is nearly forgotten. How many know now that her sailors named Formosa (beautiful) as they found its lovely shores, or think to trace her hand on every Continent!

But the anchor is being drawn up and you feel like old residents on the “Nile,” and hardly know whether you are English or Americans as you look about at the new passengers, French, Portuguese, Brazilians and Argentinos; for the English tongue and simple brusque manners fall into slight minority. French clothes, which these wealthy new-comers love, are well displayed by their ladies, and you will soon be shrugging your shoulders and gesticulating dramatically unless you are very unsympathetic. Your next meals amuse you; for the bill-of-fare which so far has had English names and dishes, now caters to at least three sets of people. The English get their bacon, their “grilled bones,” and their cold meat pies, the Americans have hash (with a foreign element of grease and onions which the true Yankee would not own), the Portuguese have baccalhao and feijao (codfish and black beans), and plenty of mutton stewed with carrots. What else? Good soups, meats, vegetables, salads and desserts, and one dish daily required by the original charter of the Royal Mail Steamship Co.--curry and rice!

These people and you are to be two weeks together now, in summer seas, a most _al fresco_ life. Each passenger has brought a deck chair to his own taste, varying from the simplest camp variety to the East Indian adjustable luxury of rattan with bottle-sockets in the arms and places to keep one’s books, field-glasses and games.

TWO WEEKS IN TROPICAL SEAS.

What will you do with yourself during the two six-day stretches from Lisbon to St. Vincent of the Cape Verde Islands and from St. Vincent to Pernambuco?

You find yourself an old resident of the ship now, and mean to gain some sense of the real life of the people about you. The passengers are clannish at table and on deck. The English and Americans fall together in groups according to their taste or experience. The Portuguese, Brazilian and Argentine elements do the same. If you speak French you can converse with any of the three latter, for they are not confined to their mother tongues. “You Americans speak so few languages,” said one, once, to me with polite derogation.

You soon settle into a routine. Early salt bath to which your steward calls you on schedule time, a cup of black coffee, breakfast at nine. Perhaps you have already been on deck and greeted your fellow-passengers, as they all do, “Have you slept well?” After breakfast a “constitutional” on deck, pausing now and then at the end railing to look down a few feet upon the five hundred steerage passengers, the common details of whose lives are very public. They are nearly all barefooted, fearfully dirty, and you gratefully watch the ship’s doctor going among them with energetic disinfectants, and take perhaps your first lesson in seeing English officers control the ignorant and unclean Latin. Your admiration rises; for their discipline is perfect even of this temporary charge. The “Nile” carries a thousand souls. Among those poor steerage people there are nearly always deaths at sea, but all is managed with quietness and consideration, and you probably will not know when the sorrowful burials take place.

You have had your walk, or your energetic game of ring-toss or shuffle-board, and sit down to rest and read, when up comes a charming young English passenger and says, “May I include you in our sweepstakes for the ladies?” and you may be as ignorant as I and answer “Yes,” in response. “Two shillings, please;” and your best friend will explain to you that you have been betting on the ship’s run for the day. If you say no, you will probably be the only woman on the ship, rich or poor, who has no chance to win, and you must be as gracious and clever as you know how to make up for your incomprehensible Puritanism. At 12.30 P.M. the ship’s run is posted, and by the time that excitement is over you go to luncheon. At 4 o’clock comes the cozy cup of tea, when perhaps some English lady will give you a slice of delicious cake she has brought from the famous Buzzard’s in London, and you will offer her American ginger snaps crisp from the can in return.

When you left England your 7 o’clock dinner not only began, but ended in broad daylight. As you near the equator the days shorten rapidly until at 6 o’clock you see the sun at the horizon, take out your watch, in three minutes you are in darkness without twilight. A week later when you land at Rio de Janeiro the sun will set at 5.15 P. M. You change temperature as well as the length of your days. Leaving England with cool weather and thick clothing, you graduate yourself into the lightest of raiment soon after leaving Lisbon. The water, the air and the sides of your cabin all maintain a temperature of 82° day and night for five or six days, and you keep yourself sheltered from the hotter rays of the sun.

One could easily imagine one’s self a guest at a summer house-party--the decks some great verandas overlooking an illimitable lawn of the bluest blue, so quiet is the water. For dinner the gentlemen wear their dinner coats, the ladies make careful toilets, and Englishmen who have lived in India wear dress suits of white linen with short jackets and broad sashes of rich silk.

At least four days before the equator is reached the young people, with the assistance of the officers, make out a two days’ program of athletic sports. Every first-class passenger is asked to enter his name for one or more of the contests, and nearly all are obliging enough to do so. Then comes the fun of appointing judges and committees; the ladies search their trunks for ribbons for badges, and trinkets for prizes are selected. Then the two days of “sports.” The veterans’ race in which old men run who haven’t done it for years, and young men’s and young women’s and children’s, three-legged races and “obstacle races,” “potato races” and “thread-and-needle races,” and the ship’s company is going from side to side and up and down to watch it all, or try to win, or compliment the winners. Well! you will have your exercise and many a good laugh, and in the evening the prizes will be distributed in the music-room by the captain or the most distinguished passenger.

After dinner you will watch the phosphorescent water gleaming like a trail of fire at the stern, take more walks with the promenaders around the decks, and repair to the music-room where your talented fellow-passengers are sure to furnish a concert, including everything from the classics to Irish ballads and college songs. Even a prestidigitator may give you a performance some night. Oh! you are all great friends now. The Portuguese Countess and you have been having an hour’s womanly visit; and you are anxious about the baby of the fascinating English wife of the Argentine ranchman who lives in such dignity in their little colony on the pampa. The baby feels the rapid change to summer heat, and you advise the mother to fill her rubber (hot) water-bag with ice-water and slip it under baby’s little pillow, and she thinks it might be well and says she has always heard the Americans were “keen after ice.”

You will be glad to see land for a few hours, though it is a dreary, treeless spot, picturesque St. Vincent. Thirty-five English telegraph operators form the nucleus of the town and are there to repeat cablegrams from the systems of wires which center there in mid-ocean. At a center of information, yet what fearful isolation! Other steamers stop for coal as yours does.

The second Sunday at sea is one to be remembered. It is spent in mid ocean, in the tropics. In the companionway is posted a notice of service in the great dining-saloon at 10.30 A. M. At ten you are sitting on deck, in a fresh white dress, waiting. Soon after the crew begins to gather, stewards, cooks, quartermasters, every one who can be spared from duty. They come in neat uniform, white trousers, navy blue jackets and caps with the Royal Mail device embroidered in color. The line of men, over a hundred, stretches the length of the deck. The captain and purser, followed by all the officers walk the length of the line for roll-call and review. The officers lead the way to the dining-saloon followed by the crew, then by the passengers. The stately service of the Church of England is read by the captain; the psalms are all sung, led by an accomplished English lady at the organ.[1] How many fine voices there are among those sailors! It is an impressive service, and you are glad that it is required by law, and that all sorts and conditions of men join in it.

[1] As the hymns and chants are those of the English Church an English musician is naturally chosen, and there are always those among the English passengers who are fully competent to render this service.

After this luncheon, and a deck unusually full of novel readers, for some of the gentlemen do not play “poker” in the smoking-room Sundays.

I remember we saw during that Sunday afternoon two men whom we had not seen before. They were reading Bibles. A notice of a Gospel service at 8 P. M. by the forward hatch was posted. We went; so did all the passengers. The two new men were the evangelists. They gave out a Gospel hymn and started it, but no one seemed to know it or joined in the singing. They read the Scripture and exhorted, expressing themselves strongly on unrighteousness, betting and the use of tobacco, while the listeners occasionally took their cigarettes out of their mouths long enough to smile derisively. We felt pained at the apparent failure and asked the captain for the cause. “Well,” said he, “these men are in the world but not of it. They have shut themselves away from the passengers, the sports; shown no friendliness to the sailors. My men are very obliging and often sing well when these missionaries come along, but this sort offends them, makes them ugly.” We saw no more of the men until they landed four days later.

PERNAMBUCO.

You cannot help being properly excited when you anchor off your first Brazilian city, Pernambuco--the sugar-shipping port. It lies two miles away--a low line of light-colored buildings with palm trees interspersed. Between you and it is the strange wall, the natural breakwater, which looks as if some human engineer had planned it there; narrow, level, twelve feet above high water, with the surf broken into white foam against its side. This reef follows the coast for several hundred miles, but not always above the water line. Opposite your anchorage is the break in the wall which would let a lighter vessel than yours over the reef; and in the quiet harbor lie the smallish craft from everywhere. At the end of the reef near you is an old bit of a Dutch fort, and it dawns on your mind that in the colonizing times between 1530 and 1660 this land was owned successively by Portugal, Spain, England, Holland and finally by Portugal again.

You may feel very superior in some ways to what you see when you go ashore, but not in the antiquity of your country nor the superiority of your coffee. The truth is you are in a life wholly different from anything you live in at home. You look down the narrow streets at buildings which remind you of the different colonists who built there. Close by is a public building, the outside walls of which are faced in pattern with glazed tiles in green and yellow like your neighbor’s new mantelpiece. Next is a stucco building, tinted to imitate pink marble, with sky-blue trimmings. It makes you laugh, it’s all so gay, but it seems pleasant after all that any people should want their very houses and stores and town halls to look so cheerful. You are not quite used to seeing fair-sized children in the street without clothes, but they are black mostly who avail themselves of such liberty. You look at the street cars, which your English companion calls a “tram” and your Brazilian escort a “bond,” and their unsleek little mules with their long fur all welted where they have been beaten, suggest room for a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

You ride over the long iron bridge built in Dom Pedro’s time to the suburb where fine residences make you realize anew how the people love brightness--for in the gardens are not only brilliant flowering plants, but wire frames among the shrubbery holding great quicksilvered balls, and your confused sense is of a continuous Christmas tree in hot weather with no gift for you. Indeed you feel in a very foreign land. There is not a tree or plant you have seen outside of greenhouses. The colors are all more brilliant, the motions more slow, the greetings more elaborate, the beggars more loathsome, the whole place more ancient and semi-decayed than anything you know. Every wall is thick to keep out the heat, every window has its “Venetian,” behind which you fancy are eyes.

A fellow-traveller on the steamer knows the life here and has been assuring you that the climate is delightful: that no one ever takes cold; that windows never are shut; that the same weight of clothing can be worn the year around; that the foreign colony is agreeable, the hand-made lace is pretty and durable, and the best “drawn-work” simply exquisite.

Six strong men row you over the two miles to your ship. Outside the reef it is rough enough to keep you very still in your little boat and glad to exchange it for a steamer, and you wonder if you can be quick enough to catch the ladder as the wave lifts your boat to meet it. It has seemed to you the last few minutes that the miracle of Peter walking on the water was being repeated several times about you on that rough sea, only these modern sea-walkers have a mast and a bench. It is really the fishermen’s catamaran, a raft constantly washed by the sea, navigated by a sail.

The ship is as familiar a home now as you can remember, and you think you know everything that can happen to you there. You have loaded and unloaded freight, listened to the noise of the ice-manufacturing, the dumping of the ashes from the furnace-room in the early morning, and the daily scrubbing down of the decks at 4 A.M. You have watched the crew go through the fire drill and the drill of manning the lifeboats. You have listened to the Captain’s stories of helping disabled ships in mid-ocean, and the heavy expense of it, and learned how they signal their distress with rockets. You know Sunday in port and Sunday at sea, how to count the “bells,” and change your watch daily to the new time. But while you are eating the first half of your dinner that night you realize that you are an object of interest to your next neighbor at table, a _bon vivant_ who has made this journey many times before. You cannot think what is the cause of his suppressed excitement. You like the fresh vegetables that have come aboard and remember your childhood when you look at the new bouquets which decorate the tables--such old-time solid pyramids of posies. At length dessert is reached. The steward brings a whole pineapple, lifts its cap (the entire outside), reveals the juicy inside cut in slices which you taste. Now you know what your neighbor wanted to see, your surprise and delight in the Pernambuco “pines,” the abacaxi (abà-ca-shee). Make the most of the abundance of this ripe, rich-flavored, tender, fiberless fruit here, for you probably won’t find anything else that tastes so good.

TWO BEAUTIFUL BAYS.

It is two days from Pernambuco to Bahia. The ship does not keep in sight of land, for coast currents are not safe.

I remember well our anchoring in 1895, in the great bay--Bahia means bay--surrounded by bluffs on which the bright-colored buildings of the city show to fine advantage. The fleet of little boats rowed out the mile to meet us. The Presbyterian missionary friends we had known so pleasantly in our own land, the Chamberlains and the Kolbs, were in one of them and we no longer felt unknown and far away.

Mr. Chamberlain said, “We came out to see you and Bishop Granbery.”

“The Bishop is not on this ship,” we replied. But persistent investigation discovered him, his wife, and the Secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the Methodist Church South in the “second-class.” The quarters located over the screw had kept them miserable from the constant vibration and seasick the entire voyage, so they were thoroughly used up.

Whoever has read “The Bishop’s Conversion”[2] will appreciate the story. Most merchants “economize some other way.” There are differing views of this economy among missionaries, and individual needs should enter into the decision, but the nervous system should be strong to endure the perpetual motion of the screw.

[2] Published by the Methodist Book Concern.

That half-day in Bahia harbor with our friends was a taste of missions at short range. Their flourishing school had just closed. It was a new venture with Miss Laura Chamberlain for principal. The last day of school had been a memorable one, visited by parents who sent their children with fear and trembling, but who came to see the ending with pride and astonishment. The secular papers had commented unrequested on the high quality of instruction--a brave deed there where Protestantism had no friends. The Brazilian owner of a great factory in a suburb had been present and proposed to pay the expenses of such a school among his employees if “we” could provide such teachers. How we all planned! How worth while it seemed to live! to plan schools for a great state in which only sixteen in a hundred could read! even if it were only for two schools, “ours” and the factory owner’s.

Mr. Chamberlain had just returned from his first long journey in the saddle away, away into the interior of the state, and found material for Gospel teaching which filled him with enthusiasm--the sturdy “cowboys,” men clad in leather, of fine physique and stamina. “Rough Riders” were not then renowned, but Mr. Chamberlain’s prophetic eye saw his men as they might be and longed to get plenty of help and be at work to realize the vision.

The religious history of the state of Bahia has been making since that day, but not without persecution. A third school was planted, and grew, out on the nearest edge of “the interior” at the cattle-market, Feira St. Anna, in spite of warnings of priests and Romish fanatics, with Christine Chamberlain as principal teacher, beloved by the children and admired by their parents, who needed such goodness, efficiency and magnetism as hers to overcome their fear of a Protestant school. Now the burning torch which was beginning to lighten that dark spot has been taken away to the land where there is no more night. Both Miss Chamberlain and her Brazilian assistant, Noemi, have died of fever, contracted while going through an unsanitary part of Bahia on a visit of friendly inspection to that “factory school.” And the factory school is like a green bay tree. The patron was warned that it might cost him his friends and even his great business, but he has been determined to accomplish such instruction for his people in spite of the fact that the Bible was to be used as freely as any text-book. He is a convert to modern (Christian) education.

Pretty Bahia seems more nearly in a comatose state than the other Brazilian cities you have heard described so freely on the steamer. You gather that there is less intelligence, more superstition, less broad public spirit, more fevers, less elegance of speech and courtesy of manner. Your steamer does not wait long enough for you to verify these impressions. You only climb the bluff in an elevator, go in a bond to see pretty suburban residences, passing consular offices with their national colors. You come back through the narrowest of streets, and stop at one church “of Our Lady,” and have a hurried look within. It is old-looking, bare and dirty to your eyes, and the image of the little Christ in His mother’s arms shocks you by its ugliness and frippery. Hung about are waxen imitations of arms, legs, heads, etc., with sores and various ailments depicted on their surfaces. You recognize them as the offerings you have heard about, and to be found in many churches, of sufferers who plead with the Mother of Our Lord to heal their diseases. Time and dust do not make these objects more pleasing to the eye.

Back again you row to the ship and dine, then go on deck. Forget the few unpleasant things you saw ashore, remember the palms and the colors, and give yourself up to the pleasure of the soft night-air and that great crescent of lights--electric and gas--from the water’s edge to the height of the bluff, with the lighthouse shining nobly at the point.

Some new passengers have come for the south, one coffee-merchant, from Boston, you are told; the others all Brazilian. You have never met people more courteous than this Brazilian Senator and his wife, but their manners are very conservative compared with their countrymen, who are now taking leave of each other after a champagne party given down in the dining-saloon by those about to sail. The men literally embrace each other, in true Brazilian style, patting each other’s shoulder-blades, and their kissing is on both cheeks. A criticism I once heard there of an average gentleman of the United States was, “He had no manners whatever. Why, he did not even know enough to shake hands.” So from now on you must have your hand ready, and soon learn _bom dia_, good-day, to say to every one you really meet.

A little over two days and you are about to enter the famous harbor of Rio de Janeiro. Deeply serrated mountains form the coast, with varying altitudes from one to four thousand feet, and the city of four hundred thousand people is so crowded by these precipitous heights that it must wind its way up several valleys and over the lesser hills with at least two cog-wheel railroads to the upper levels. These items have been told you by some new friends you have made on the ship, who are generous with all they know; and one man even brings you a paragraph he has copied from the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, which says: “The Bay of Rio de Janeiro has been the subject of poetic panegyric ever since it was discovered; and the traveler who comes to it after a voyage round the world seems as susceptible to its charm as if it were his first tropical experience. This bay is the very gate to a tropical paradise. There is nowhere so bold a coast, such a picturesque cluster of mountains, such a maze of inlets and outlets, such a burst of all-pervading vegetation. The actual entrance between Fort São João and Fort Santa Cruz is 1700 yards wide. Within there are fifty square miles of anchorage, or even more for vessels of light draught, the bay having a width varying from two to seven miles, and stretching inland from the sea for sixteen miles. Its coast line, neglecting minor indentations, measures sixty miles. Such a sheet of water would be beautiful anywhere; but, when on all sides it is surrounded by hills of the most varied contour, the beauty is enhanced a thousandfold. Its surface is broken by a large number of islands from Governor’s Island, six miles long, down to the little clusters.” This man, by the way, started from England for the round trip of the “Nile,” making altogether a two months’ voyage. He has a large state-room, with books, mostly of science and reference.

For seventeen days you have heard of Rio, and Rio, and Rio, on deck and at table; for many of your companions live there or are eager to see it for the first time. You are up by six o’clock to lose none of the early morning view. The ship is nervous among the shore currents outside the harbor, then makes one great plunge over the bar, whereat all the old residents laugh familiarly, and glides in stately quiet within the smooth harbor.

You have had your early black coffee, so stay with all the rest to take in the exquisite beauty. Seeing is better than being told. Your lungs drink in the soft air. Your eyes drink in the forms and colors. Here is the old Sugar Loaf, sheer rock a thousand feet up out of the water, a sharp cone, gray, softened by green mosses, the sentinel of the city. There is the city built to the water’s edge, with sharp hills in the midst, crowned each with a church, “built in Jesuit style.” The groups and alleys of the royal palms are tall and straight, some of them a hundred feet in height, your neighbor says.

The ship anchors not unduly near another ship. There are many others, warships and sailing vessels and steamers, “tramps” and “regular liners.” In an incredibly short time a fleet of launches and row-boats surround you, and happy are you if you, too, find some one there to meet you. Here is an Englishman to meet the gentle wife and troop of little children he sent “home” a year ago to build up in cold weather. You look the other way at the bank clerk sent to meet two new recruits, and at the manager of an American coffee firm who comes to meet the man who is to be his substitute while he goes “home” for six months’ change. But perhaps you are most interested to see the Scotchman who has come for his bride, for she has been such a cosy, little body all the way down. She sailed “in care of the captain,” brought her wedding dress, her wedding cake and requisite legal papers along, has been everybody’s helper and nobody’s trouble, and finally has the nickname of Sammy, which is short for good Samaritan. She will have a Brazilian civil marriage service first, then the chaplain of the Church of England will perform a religious one, and three weeks after she lands the British consul will marry the couple a third time and the notice can be recorded “at home.” England does not intend to countenance runaway marriages. At the end of the third service you may telegraph your good wishes to “the Bride of the Nile.”

The American knows the Rio Secretary of the International Young Men’s Christian Association, and invites him to the steamer breakfast, of which nearly all now partake, both passengers and visitors. You and your husband are invited to be of the party to go ashore in that launch, and spend the day till four o’clock sight-seeing. You are advised to spend your nights in Petropolis; for it is beautiful up there, and a slight risk to stay down in the city at night on account of “the fever.”

You prove during that first day in Rio that the narrow streets are lined with really interesting stores containing goods quite beautiful, but very expensive. You see French clothes and fine diamonds; brilliant birds, stuffed; and humming-birds set in gold for jewelry; feather flowers of the most beautiful colors, made from the natural, undyed plumage of tropical birds--crimson, pink and snow-white rose buds, pale pink morning-glories, scarlet coffee-cherries, all with green feather foliage. Such blossoms would not suffer in your bonnet if you wore them in the rain, but no one does it.

You stop a moment at the large music-store, having its own and foreign publications, and there catch the first strains of a Brazilian Tango, the dance of Spanish rhythm which you find quite new and fascinating. You will hear this same rhythm many times before you leave Brazil, but will not find it used for dancing.

You visit the large and elegant library building, containing they say one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, but see no readers. It was of royal origin long ago.

You go to see the new Young Men’s Christian Association Building, the only one in Brazil, while your guide, Mr. Myron Clark, from Minneapolis, tells you the demand upon it in this port, and you wish it were not such a struggle to raise money for it. “The foreigners” are quite ready to contribute to the English hospital, for any of them may need its care; but the use of a Y. M. C. A. is not familiar to many of them. How shall it get the money it deserves?

You go to see the National Art Gallery and find a few good pictures of local feeling or history, but otherwise the work of artists who have studied in Paris. You have climbed one precipice of five hundred feet by the “Plano inclinado,” looked down over the brilliant city flecked with palms, and followed the substantial aqueduct “built by the Jesuits” long ago, which brings water into town from the heights, over arches at first low, but rising about a hundred feet across one valley. The masonry is stuccoed, moss-grown, fern-draped; the water pure and refreshing. You ascend to the top of Corcovado, twenty-five hundred feet high, by another cog-wheel railroad, and find a little shelter-house at the peak from which you see the wonderful view of city, bay, other mountains and ocean bathed in light; then hurry down to get the “barca,” the large fine ferry-boat which takes you ten miles across the bay on your way to Petropolis. It leaves at four in the afternoon. How you love that sail in the soft air across that beautiful bay! You look forward to the great Organ Mountains up which you will soon be climbing, and wonder what harmonies came from those giant fluted pipes when the morning stars sang together. You have good company, English, German and American in addition to the Brazilian. Too soon you are in the train which speeds along the few level miles, then dismembers and climbs the heavy grade in sections. You will never forget the outlook from these windows and wonder if so much beauty has existed all these years known to so few.

PETROPOLIS.

Four thousand feet up, and back from all sight of the harbor, you reach Petropolis, built first as the summer residence of the Emperor, Dom Pedro, and named for himself. It is a beautiful town, the home of rich Brazilians, foreign merchants and foreign legations, for it is the diplomatic center. While you stay at the English Pensáo Honoria, some ship-friends are near by at the Hungarian Pensáo Central, both with unusually good food and service. In the garden great bushes of the camelia are covered with waxen blossoms and the poinsettia blazes beside a hedge of heliotrope. Humming-birds dart in and out among the shrubs. Through the middle of every street runs the mountain stream in a stone-curbed channel, spanned by Indian-red bridges at the street crossings.

Dom Pedro was the “village improvement society,” and the main street is still called the “Rua Imperador” although it was renamed when he was banished. The town follows the narrow valleys between hills always green. The gardens are bewildering in their profusion of flowers. Lilies blossom as they do in California. Orange trees perfume the air. The verandas are but a step up from the ground, and the rooms open upon the verandas. You feel little need for a house. Only hotels and palaces are two stories high; the rest are one.

The British Minister, the American, the Swedish, the Belgian, the German, the Argentine, with their suites, are soon recognizable. You go to call on your American Minister, find it is an afternoon “at home,” and imagine you know what the confusion of tongues was like, for all the other kinds of foreigners are there. You go also to call on the Methodist missionary, sent by the Southern Church from Georgia. He is the only Protestant minister living in this region except the German Lutheran, who is the shepherd of a colony of good German workers imported by the Emperor long ago.

These Methodists have begun with a school instead of a church, and have honored their work by buying a beautiful building in beautiful grounds for a seminary, which is the only rival of the school of the nuns in the old imperial palace. These are both boarding as well as day-schools. You smile when you become conscious of some of the difficulties these teachers have in preparing text-books and explaining general literature, for the North Star is not visible--the Southern Cross has taken its work. December, January and February are the hottest months; Christmas will probably be scorching; the sun shines in at the north windows, and the farther south you go the colder it grows; for you are south of the equator. Have Australia and South Africa and South America had to read all our best literature all these years with a commentary to make it intelligible!

The Portuguese days of the week suggest Old and New Testament instead of the heathenish origin of Anglo-Saxon names:

Monday _Segunda Feira_ Second Market Day.
Tuesday _Terça Feira_ Third Market Day.
Wednesday _Quarta Feira_ Fourth Market Day.
Thursday _Quinta Feira_ Fifth Market Day.
Friday _Sexta Feira_ Sixth Market Day.
Saturday _Sabbado_ The Sabbath.
Sunday _Domingo_ The Lord’s Day.

You have made several friends among coffee, insurance, banking, exchange, diplomatic and missionary people, and have discovered mutual friends “at home”; so you have had visits and invitations to drive and to walk, and now have one for a breakfast at one o’clock on Sunday. Really just what would the Sabbath Observance Committee do here? There is no English service till four in the afternoon, to be held in a hall over a grocery store by the missionary of the Methodist Church. A Frenchman comes to mind who mentioned with bewildered disgust the American plea for closing the Exposition on Sunday: “What do they expect us to do, then! Sit on a bench in the park all day!”

The business men are all at home, glad to rest one day in seven from the three hours’ journey to their Rio offices and the three hours back, besides their exciting markets. Through the week they have little chance for exercise, for the only train down the mountain leaves at seven in the morning, and one cannot reach home much before seven at night. The early coffee has thoroughly wakened and fortified the system against malaria. You see with what keen pleasure the various parties start off on horseback or a-wheel. They will ride until they are healthily tired and come back to be entertained in little groups at hospitable boards. What will you do? accept the invitation and join one of the groups? or stay in your own garden, and eat your own hotel breakfast?

In any case you attend the service in the hall, in company with thirty or forty others. Double this number in town are English or Americans. One of the Methodist schoolteachers plays the harmonium. Moody and Sankey hymns are sung. It is more nearly a piece of North America than anything you have seen since you left that beloved spot, but the setting is foreign, from the different wall-paper patterns to the very wide boards of very hard wood which compose the bare floor, and the foreign-looking houses you see through the window. Your missionary preacher has held a Portuguese service, attended by the poor, in the morning, and a collection keeps this English service self-supporting, so far as room-rent goes.

You must make another trip to Rio. This time your first objective point will be the Botanical Garden, with its magnificent alley of palms, its more beautiful alley of bamboos, old tamarind trees and other attractions. You will not be disappointed in the beauty, but you will be surprised to find yourself there almost alone. The “bond” has taken you through interesting streets, and quite a long distance on the edge of the bay. You have skirted hills built to the top and others too steep for that. You return to the heart of town in time for a late breakfast, one o’clock, which you may have invited some friends to share at a capital restaurant on “the Ouvidor.” You climb a long flight of stairs to a large, cool, pleasant room with many open windows. Every room by law must be at least fifteen feet high, whatever its floor dimensions, and public rooms are always frescoed with old-time panels and bunches of flowers.

What is the Ouvidor? A very narrow street, too narrow for vehicles, lined on both sides for seven or eight blocks with the best stores of Rio. It is also a meeting-place for politicians and newsmongers, gentlemen of leisure and fashion.

When I went to Rio first in 1884 it was not proper for a woman to go in the street without some man to take care of her. She certainly could not go to shop alone in the Ouvidor as she sometimes does now.

When Prof. Agassiz visited Brazil, “on the occasion of his first lectures delivered in the capital, he earnestly requested the emperor that ladies might be allowed to be present,--a privilege till then denied them on grounds of etiquette. The request was granted, and the sacred domain of science for the first time was thrown open to the women of South America.”[3]

[3] _Reminiscences._ Julia Ward Howe.

Now she is verily a new woman, being far less restricted. The sanitary conditions of the streets have been improved. The sights do not shock her ideas of propriety. Rio is fast becoming a city like any in Southern Europe, never forgetting its superior natural charms. Whoever would have thought that the probable presence of women on the streets of a town could work a revolution! Even the negro porters and little children are now reasonably clad. I used to apostrophize the coffee-sack, ripped a little way at the bottom and a little way on each side to let a head and pair of arms through, as the only garment of the poor man, but now the coffee-sack serves only its original purpose. The curious tin trumpets projecting from the level of the second floors no longer, so far as I have seen, discharge the pails of water which were thrown on the floors and swept out through these convenient vents into the street. There are no longer bonds labeled “descalços,” (barefooted) in which such were compelled to ride.