CHAPTER VII

BUMPING UP TO RIO

Upon the thirty-first parallel of south latitude, three hundred and sixty miles north of Montevideo, there is a town of divided allegiance, situated in both the smallest and the largest countries of South America. When the traveler descends from the “Uruguay Central” he finds it is named for Colonel Rivera, the Custer of Uruguay, who made the last stand against the Charrúa Indians and was killed by them in 1832. But as he goes strolling along the main street, gazing idly into the shop windows, he notes all at once that the signs in them have changed in words and prices, that even the street has an entirely different name, for instead of the Calle Principal it has become the Rua Sete de Setembro, and suddenly he awakens to the fact that instead of taking a stroll in the town of Rivera, in the República Oriental del Uruguay, as he fancied, he has wandered into Santa Anna do Livramento in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the United States of Brazil.

There is no getting away from the saints even when the tongue and nationality and even the color of the population changes, for the Portuguese adventurers who settled the mighty paunch of South America were quite as eager for celestial blessings on their more or less nefarious enterprises as were their fellow scamps and contemporaries, the Spanish conquistadores. But the stray traveler in question is sure to find that another atmosphere has suddenly grown up about him. Barracks swarming with muscular black soldiers, wearing long cloaks, in spite of the semi-tropical weather, as nearly wrong side out as possible, in order to display the brilliant red with which they are lined, give a belligerent aspect to this warmer and mightier land. Negroes and piccaninnies and the unpainted makeshift shacks that commonly go with them are scattered over all the landscape; oxen with the yokes on their necks rather than in front of their horns testify to the change from Spanish custom; instead of the pretty little plaza with its well-kept promenades, its comfortable benches, and its well-tended flower plots that forms the center of Rivera or any other Spanish-American town that has the slightest personal pride, there is a _praça_, muddy, untended, seatless, and unadorned. The sun, too, has begun to bite again in a way unfamiliar in the countries in southern and temperate South America.

Rivera and Santa Anna do Livramento are physically a single town. The international boundary runs through the center of a football field in which boys in Brazil pursue a ball set in motion in Uruguay, and climbs up over a knoll on the top of which sits a stone boundary post, the two countries rolling away together over plump hills densely green in color, except where the enamel of nature has been chipped off to disclose a reddish sandy soil. Surely Brazil, stretching for thirty-seven degrees of latitude from Uruguay to the Guianas, a distance as far as from Key West to the top of Labrador, with a width of nearly as many degrees of longitude from Pernambuco to the Andes and covering more space than the continental United States, is large enough so that its inhabitants need not have crowded their huts to the very edge of the boundary line in this fashion, as if they were fleeing from oppressive rulers, or were determined that little Uruguay shall not thrust her authority an inch farther north.

I went over into Brazil early in the day, it being barely three blocks from my “Gran Hotel Nuevo,” which was neither grand, new, nor, strictly speaking, a hotel. But when the sockless manager-owner of the main hostelry of Sant’ Anna asked me two thousand something or other for the privilege of lying on a hilly cot not unlike a dog’s nest in a musty hole already occupied by several other guests, I concluded to remain in Uruguay as long as possible. In Montevideo a cablegram had advised me to make myself known to the Brazilian railway officials at the frontier and learn something to my advantage. I could not shake off a vague uneasiness at entering with slight funds a country of which I had heard many a disagreeable tale and where I expected to undergo the unpleasant experience of not understanding the language. Yet when at length I found the station-master of the “Compagnie Auxiliaire,” in a red cap but, I was relieved to note, a white skin, we talked for some time of the general pass with sleeping-car accommodations which the discerning general manager of the railways of southern Brazil seemed bent on thrusting upon me, before I realized that he was speaking Portuguese and I Spanish, and understanding each other perfectly.

It is 2058 miles by rail from Montevideo to Rio de Janeiro, and the cost of this overland trip to the average traveler with a trunk or two and a moderate appetite would be about $150. One may leave the Uruguayan capital on Monday, for instance, by one of the three weekly trains, and arrive in the Brazilian capital on the following Saturday, spending only one night motionless on the way—if one is contented to be a mere tourist rather than a traveler and is not overburdened with baggage. For this must be carried the mile or more over the frontier, at which it is examined by a band of stupid and discourteous negroes, who seem to delight in putting as many obstacles as possible in the way of the well-to-do traveler. Not being included in that category, my own day’s halt in Rivera was entirely by choice; but for those more in haste than curious for a glimpse of Brazilian life it is cheaper, faster, and more comfortable to make the journey by sea.

The daily train northward leaves Santa Anna at 7:35, which is seven by Uruguayan time, and I was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour for midwinter June to find the world weighed down under a dense, bone-soaking blanket of fog. The street lamps of both countries, judging daylight by the calendar rather than by the facts, kept going out just half a block ahead of me as I stumbled through the impenetrable gloom, the streets by no means improving at the frontier. I might have crossed this without formality had I not chosen to wake the negro guard from a sound sleep in his kiosk and insist upon his doing his duty. One would fancy that an official stationed five feet from a Spanish-speaking country would pick up a few words of that language, yet these customhouse negroes professed not to understand a word of Spanish, no matter how much it sounded like their native Portuguese. At length, with a growl for having been disturbed, the swarthy guardian waved a hand at me in a bored, tropical way, drew his resplendent cloak about him again, and stretched out once more on his wooden bench.

It was a long mile of slippery mud and warm humidity to the station, where black night still reigned and where yet another African official came to _revisar_ my baggage, for much contraband passes this frontier in both directions. Finally something resembling daybreak forced its reluctant way through the gray mass that hung over and crept into everything, and our narrow-gauge half-freight took to bumping uncertainly northward. What a change from the clean, comfortable, equal-to-anywhere trains of Uruguay! Even our “primeiro,” with its two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other, was as untidy, unmended, slovenly as the government railways of Chile, and every mile forward seemed to bring one that much nearer the heart of happy-go-lucky Latin-America.

I wrapped myself in all the garments I possessed, regretting that I owned no overcoat, as we shivered jerkily onward across a wild, shaggy, mist-heavy country inhabited only by cattle and with no stopping-place all the morning, except Rosario, entitled to consider itself a town. I fell to reading a Porto Alegre newspaper of a day or two before, for as I could usually guess the meaning of the spoken tongue, so I could read Portuguese, like a man skating over thin ice—as long as I kept swiftly going all was well, but if I stopped to examine a word closely, I was lost. Brazilians would have you believe that Portuguese is a purer form of the tongue from which Spanish is descended; Spanish-speaking South Americans assert that Portuguese is a degenerate dialect of their own noble language and even go so far as to refer to it privately as “lingua de macacos,” of which phrase the last word is the Portuguese term for monkey. Thanks to my long familiarity with their tongue I found myself siding with the Castilian branch of the family.

On the printed page it was hard to treat this new tongue with due seriousness. I found myself unable to shake off the impression that the writer had never learned to spell, or at least had not been able to force his learning upon the printer. The stuff looked as if the latter had “pied” the form, and then had not had time to find all the letters again or have the proof corrected. Thus cattle, instead of being _ganado_, as it should be, was merely _gado_; _general_ had shrunk to _geral_, and to make matters worse still more letters were dropped in forming the plural, so that such monstrosities as _geraes_ and _automobeis_ shrieked at the reader in every line. Fancy calling tea _chá_; think of writing _esmola_ when you mean _limosna_! It suggested dialect invented by a small Spanish boy so angry he “wouldn’t play any more,” and who had taken to horribly mispronouncing and absurdly misspelling the tongue of himself and his playmates, yet who had not originality enough to form a really new language. And what a treacherous language! The short, simple, everyday words were the very ones most apt to be entirely different; thus _dos_ was no longer “two” but “of the”; “two” was now _dois_ in the masculine and _duas_ in the feminine, and there was still a _dous_—the plural form, I suppose. A _trapiche_ was no longer a primitive sugarmill, but a warehouse; a cigar had become a mere _charuto_. The Portuguese seemed to avoid the letter “l” as zealously as do the Japanese, replacing it by “r”—_la plaza_ had been deformed into _a praça_, _el plato_ had become _o prato_. Where they were not doubling the “n,” contrary to all rules of Castilian spelling, they were leaving it out entirely, and one was asked to admire the silvery rays of _a lua_! A man had been brought before a judge because he had seen fit to _espancar_ his wife, yet the context showed that it was no case of the application of the corrective slipper. I was reading along as smoothly and calmly as in English when all at once the headline “Esposição International de Borrachas em Londres” struck my eye. Válgame Diós! An International Exposition of Drunken Women! Seven thousand miles away, too! And why in London, rather than in Glasgow? That particular headline would have cost me much mental anguish had I not had the foresight in Montevideo to buy a “Portuguez-Hespanhol” pocket vocabulary. And what, of all things, should _borracha_ be, in this absurd, mispronounced dialect, but _rubber_, and no drunken woman at all, thus depriving the article at once of all interest!

The chief trouble with written Portuguese is that it has never been operated on for appendicitis. Parts that have long since ceased to function have not been cut off, as in the close-cropped Spanish, and such words as _simples_, _fructa_, and the like retain their useless unpronounced letters until the written word is almost as absurdly unlike the spoken one as in English. Yet the tongue of Brazil has at least the advantage that it is in some ways easier to pronounce than Spanish. The guttural Castilian j, for example, over which the foreign tongue almost invariably stumbles, is missing, and while few Americans can say _jefe_ in the Spanish fashion they can all give it the Portuguese sound “shefe”; and if _mejor_ taxes the Anglo-Saxon palate, _melhor_ is perfectly easy. Moreover, life is a constant holiday in Portuguese. _Domingo_ and _sabbado_ are days of rest under any name; but it seems unwise to mislead a naturally indolent people into thinking that every day is a “feast day” by calling Monday “second festival,” Tuesday “third festival” and so on, forcing the stranger to do some finger and toe counting to find that _quarta-feira_, or “fourth festival,” was none other than this very Wednesday so foggily hanging about us. To hear the kinky-haired trainman tell me in a long series of mispronunciations that if I chose to let this one go on without me I could get another train at “twenty:thirty-two on fifth feast-day” required some nimble mental exertion to figure out that the lunatic was trying to say 8:32 P. M. on Thursday.

The line out of Santa Anna is really a branch of the long and important one from Uruguayana on the Uruguay River, dividing Brazil from the Argentine, to the large “lagoon towns” of Pelotas and Rio Grande on the Atlantic. About noon we tumbled out of our rattling conveyance at Cacequy and took another train, on the line to Porto Alegre, capital of the enormous “estado gaucho,” or “cowboy state,” southernmost of Brazil and larger than all Uruguay. It rambled in and about low hills, with an excellent grazing country spread out to the horizon on every hand, and at four—beg pardon, sixteen o’clock—set us down at the considerable town of Santa Maria on a knoll among wooded hills, the junction where those bound for the capital of the state must take leave of those on their way to the capital of the republic. I was privileged to occupy room No. 1 in the chief hotel of the town, which was no doubt a high honor. But as it chanced to be between the front door of the building and the cobbled entrance corridor, with either window or door opening directly on crowds of impudent newsboys, lottery vendors, and servants, it was not unlike being between the devil—or at least a swarm of his progeny—and the deep sea. Indeed, it quickly became evident that Brazilian hotels of the interior would prove no better than those in the three southern countries of South America, where the traveler is expected to pay a fortune for the privilege of tossing out the night on a hilly cot and where the meals never vary an iota,—beginning unfailingly with _fiambre_, or thin slices of cold meat, and hurrying through several dishes of hot meat, down to the inevitable _dulce de membrillo_, a hard quince jelly which is the sad ending of all meals at the lower end of South America. Nowhere does the Latin-American’s lack of initiative show more clearly than in the kitchen. To increase my gloom, the French proprietress, whose every glance caused my thin pocketbook to writhe with fear, manipulated the items so cleverly that, though placards on the walls announced the rate as seven _milreis_ a day, and I was there only from sunset until a little after sunrise, she handed me a bill for 13,500 _reis_!

Luckily I had already weathered the first shock of the traveler who comes rudely in contact with the Brazilian money system, but I paid miser-faced old madame in a daze, and retired to a quiet corner to figure up the exact extent of the disaster that had befallen me. On due reflection it proved to be not quite so overwhelming as it had sounded. Even when they are reduced to real money Brazilian prices are not mild, but they are by no means so utterly insane as they sound. The monetary unit is the _real_, in theory only, for no such coin exists, and in practice only the plural _reis_ is used, the real unit being the _milreis_, one thousand _reis_. For years the _milreis_ had remained at the fixed value of fifteen to the English pound. In larger transactions—and most transactions are large in Brazil—the unit is the _conto_, one million _reis_, about $325. Gold is never seen in circulation. Between the _milreis_ and the _conto_ there are paper notes, usually printed in New York; silver coins from five hundred to two thousand _reis_, and nickel pieces of four, two, and one hundred complete the list in common circulation. Lastly, lest the unwarned stranger be led astray by appearances, the Brazilian places his dollar sign after the _milreis_ and before the _reis_, so that 3$250 means the normal equivalent of an American dollar, and the man who pays $500 for a newspaper or a small glass of iced cane-juice does not feel that he has been unusually extravagant—at least if he has lived long enough in Brazil to get the local point of view.

A pair of German peasants sat in a corner of the second-class coach when we pulled out of Santa Maria. Theirs were the same honest, wrinkled, hard-working, unimaginative faces one sees in rural Germany. The woman, with a kerchief over her head and her bare feet thrust into low slippers, was as devoid of feminine coquettishness as of desire for adornment, a picture of the plodding, toilsome helpmate of the thoroughly Teuton farmer at her side. Yet I found that they had never been outside the southernmost state of Brazil, though they spoke German with far more ease than they did Portuguese, and their appearance would not have attracted the slightest attention in the very heart of Germany.

The three fertile southern states of Brazil are on an elevated plateau that makes them excellent cereal and fruit regions well suited as a permanent habitation of the white race. All that portion of Brazil below Rio de Janeiro is of comparatively recent settlement. During the colonial period Portuguese energy was directed almost exclusively to the semi-tropical and tropical regions of the north, to Bahia and Pernambuco, where rich tobacco and sugar plantations could be worked with slave labor, or to the gold and diamond lands of the interior, with their special attractions to impatient fortune hunters. The splendid pasture lands of the temperate zone were scorned by these eager adventurers; maps printed as late as 1865 bear across all these southern provinces the words “unknown and inhabited by wild Indians.”

The Germans, to be sure, had begun to appear before that. Barely had the exiled emperor of Portugal settled down in 1808, to rule his immense overseas domain when he set about filling in its waste spaces by an immigration policy that is to this day continued by the states themselves. Not only Dom João but his successors, the two Dom Pedros, turned to Switzerland and Germany for the hardy settlers needed to tame this south-temperate wilderness. The first official German colony in Brazil was founded in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and for twenty-five years Teutonic settlers were established at many different points, chiefly in the three southernmost states, in some cases as far north as Minas Geraes. But in 1859 the German government forbade emigration to Brazil. The original settlers are therefore long since dead and the present inhabitants are of the third or fourth generation, born in Brazil, and with little more than a traditional feeling for the Fatherland. Yet it is a peculiarity of South American civilization that it does not impose itself upon European immigration to any such degree as does that of the United States. Ask the man whose father, or even grandfather, emigrated from Germany to Brazil what his nationality is and he is almost certain to reply, without any consciousness of the strangeness of his answer, “Ich bin Deutsch.” If the German has remained a German in Brazil, it is perhaps as much the fault of the Brazilian environment as by his own choice. There are cities in the southern states of Brazil so German that men and women born in them speak not a word of Portuguese. This is particularly frequent in the district about Porto Alegre and in the “lagoon country” between there and the Uruguayan boundary. Joinville, in Santa Catharina, named for a German prince who married the daughter of an emperor of Brazil, is so German that the Portuguese tongue attracts attention in the streets, as it does in several other of the thirteen colonies founded before the ban was placed on German emigration. Even the inhabitants who speak Portuguese do so with difficulty and with a strong Teutonic accent. The school teachers of these former colonies are subsidized German pastors; the German element is so strong as often to elect a German state president—the states of Brazil have presidents rather than governors. For several years all office holders in Santa Catharina, with the exception of the Federal Court, appointed in Rio, were Germans, and the anomaly of Brazilian government reports written by men who scarcely knew the language of the country in which they ruled was by no means unusual.

It is estimated that there are now about a million descendants of Germans in the three or four southern states of Brazil, a territory approximately as large as our “solid south” east of the Mississippi. Their adopted country was liberal to the early settlers, allotting 175 acres of land to each immigrant, though this has been much reduced in individual cases by speculative abuses. Not until 1896 was the German edict against migration to Brazil removed, and by that time the southern states had attracted new settlers, particularly from Italy. The state of São Paulo, for instance, has built up her great coffee industry and factory production chiefly on Italian immigration. The Germans are said always to seek the lower lands and the river bottoms, raising especially pigs and vegetables, while the Italians plant the high ridges farther back from the sea with corn and grapes, with the result that such towns as Garabaldi and Novo Hamburgo, Blumenau and Angelina, are but a cannon-shot apart.

Where the great Lagoa dos Patos opens to the sea at the town of Rio Grande, on sandy, onion-growing flats that follow two hundred miles of shifting sand dunes from Imbituba southward, is a hot, often sand-beaten point once ruled by powerful British firms. It is nearly a hundred miles up this “inland sea” to the capital of the state, with 200,000 inhabitants, which with the large town of Pelotas is the great port of embarkation of the _xarque_, as the _tasajo_, or thick dried beef, of the Argentine is called in Brazil. One by one the German traders crowded out their competitors in this region; with the docile population of the “lagoon cities” racially friendly to them they established a virtual German monopoly of German commercial and financial houses in coöperation with German shipping. Where the German ruled there was no room for any other European or American, not even for Brazilian industry, and in each of these coastal cities of southern Brazil a great German firm was supreme dictator before the World War, which was not the least of the many causes of that war. What advantages these uncrowned rulers of their million unsophisticated and often unconscious subjects might have taken in establishing themselves and their Fatherland more firmly in Brazil if the world conflict had ended differently is of course now a purely academic question.

The lines of southern Brazil could scarcely be made a real railroad in the American sense without complete rebuilding, for they constantly squirm and twist and wind their way over the lightly rolling country, seeking always the higher levels and never by any chance running for a yard straight forward. One of the trainmen asserted that if a cow got in the way of the surveyors who laid out the line, they moved the transit rather than exert themselves to go and drive her away. Less facetious officials explained that the engines are so weak that anything steeper than a one per cent. grade was avoided in the building, and that this was done on contract by Brazilians and by the mile. From the car-windows we had frequent views of the engineer and the fireman in their cab; we darted from side to side so often that, it would have been easy to imagine the little engine in terror of the many wide-horned cattle scattered over the rolling landscape. The brakes were frequently called upon to keep us from running over the time-table; stations or crossings were so rare that the whistle was uncomfortably startling; at the rare places where we did officially stop an extended argument usually arose between the station master in his red cap and the trainmen in their blue ones as to when it would be fitting and advisable to jolt onward.

Beyond the large town of Passo Fundo appeared, first singly, then in roomy clusters, the splendid _pinheiro araucarai_, the slender yet sturdy Brazilian pine-tree, erect and entirely free from branches to the very top, from which these suddenly spread thickly out at right angles to the trunk. The parasol-pine makes excellent lumber, being lighter yet stronger than our northern pine, but above all it beautifies the landscape. The rare small clumps of it in the hollows became more and more numerous until, at Erechim, we found ourselves in an entire forest of parasol-pines, with an atmosphere strikingly like our northern lumber woods. The weather had grown so warm that in the middle of the day it was uncomfortable to sit in the unshaded car window, and creepers and lianas were beginning to appear in the semi-tropical forests, silent but for the song of the tree-toad.

I descended at the station of Erebango to spend the “Fourth” with a fellow-countryman in charge of the construction of a branch railway through the Jewish “Colonia Quatro Irmãos.” At the station was gathered a group of Semitic immigrants just arrived from Europe, still in the same heavy garb and wool caps in which they had left their wintry home. We boarded the constructor’s “motor gallego,” a hand-car pumped by four lusty Galicians, and struck out in company with the Jewish manager of the colony. Each Jew was given upon arrival a piece of land and some stock, the latter to be paid for after he got his start. For an hour we pumped our way through semi-tropical forest, here and there broken by clearings scattered with light-colored wooden houses, to come out upon a more open rolling country suggestive of Uruguay but with clumps of the beautiful parasol-pine in the hollows. Then I was furnished a horse and rode away over the ridges, visiting a score of Jewish families. It being Saturday, they were dressed in their Sabbath best, some of them, who had lived in the United States, as overdressed as Irish “hired girls” going to mass. Men, women, and children were gathered in large groups drinking _schnaps_, and several of the men, in low-crowned derbies, grew confidential and told me they wished they were back in “Heshter Schtreet.” I spoke German to their Yiddish, as I did Spanish to my peon’s Portuguese, and not only carried on conversation easily but several times acted as interpreter. The little unpainted houses were tolerably clean, with cheap lace curtains; and schoolhouses were being built. But though some of them had been here for months, there was little evidence of any work being done by the colonists themselves. One got the impression that they preferred to live on the charity of the association and its wealthy European sponsors rather than indulge in physical exertion under the semi-tropical sun, and one wondered if it was possible to make a farmer out of the Jew, whether the colonists were not merely waiting for a town to grow up, that they might go and sell things to one another. The railway company of southern Brazil, which is British-American, as well as the Brazilian Government, is favoring such immigration, but a casual glimpse of the colony did not suggest that this was the best means of bringing the fertile waste places of the republic into productive activity.

The tri-weekly train picked me up two days later, the privacy of my narrow-gauge _dormitorio_ being again unbroken. Hour after hour we rambled on in leisurely tropical fashion. The water tanks were not at the stations but wherever streams gave a supply, thereby increasing the number of stops. Once a horse got on the track and ran for seven miles ahead of the tooting little engine, refusing to leave the rails even when the fireman got off and threw imported coal at it while the train crept on after him. To have run into the animal would probably have spilled our toy locomotive down the embankment of red earth. Finally a group of Polish men and women gathered on the track ahead and forced the weary beast to take to the _matta_, the jungled wilderness that shut us in. At another stop the station-master, a pale blond who spoke German but who sold tickets like a Latin-American, would not give the engineer the signal to start until he had sent a boy to drive his ducks out from under the engine where they were lolling in the shade. The number of curs prowling about the stations made it easy to believe a joker’s assertion that the dogs know the train schedule and line up along the track in proper time and place for their tri-weekly banquet from the dining-car. Here was the most costly part of the line, built by American engineers, many bridges and viaducts lifting it across deep wooded gullies with wonderful vistas of tree-tops, the dark green of the _pinheiro_ still predominating in the sky-line.

At Marcellino Ramos a big bridge carried us across the River Uruguay, which not only rises in Brazil but forms the boundary between its two southernmost states. Through trains had been operated on this line for less than a year. Before that the overland traveler from Montevideo to Rio had to stop six times overnight on the way and had often to be poled across dangerous rivers. Then one crossed the Uruguay at Marcellino Ramos in the darkness on a crazy launch operated by a crazier Brazilian who let go the steering-wheel to roll cigarettes and who generally succeeded in drowning some of the baggage, if not the passengers. The launch landed its cargo at the foot of a steep muddy slope more than a hundred feet high, at the top of which travelers fought for the privilege of paying a fortune for a plank to lie on and for such stuff as the predatory keeper of what he miscalled a hotel saw fit to provide for stifling their appetites.

Here we left the enormous “_gaucho_ state” behind and struck off across the narrow state of Santa Catharina, through which we followed the placid Rio do Peixe, or Fish River, for a hundred and sixty-five miles, passing several waterfalls. The wooded _serra_ of Santa Catharina rose slightly into the sky, and on all sides the world was thickly clothed with jungle, though there were occasional small clearings with clusters of crude new shanties. In places the palm grew close beside the parasol-pine. Groups of ponies under clumsy native saddles were tied to posts or wooden rails before the _armazem_ inside which their owners were drinking away their Sunday. Blonds predominated at the rare stations, tow-heads covered by kerchiefs peered from every doorway of the houses, with their concave shingled roofs. Most of them seemed to be Poles, and as all the way from Santa Maria northward the soil had been a rich dark-red, domestic animals, children, and the garments of the peasants themselves were dyed in that hue. Some of the dwellings were like the plans of old Nuremburg brought to the tropics and set down in the midst of the wilderness. There is a great difference between living conditions in this region, where land is rarely more than five dollars an acre, and Illinois, for example, with its schools, roads, and community interests, yet settlers found much the same pioneer conditions as this in Illinois when land was five dollars an acre there, and in addition winters of snow and ice.

In my sleeper, which had not had another passenger since it began its journey at the Uruguayan boundary, the porter seemed to be hurt that anyone should intrude upon his privacy. But if there was room to spare in my car, the second-class coaches were sufficiently packed to make up for it. Brazilian railway rules require that persons without shoes or coats shall not ride first-class, hence it may have been something more than price that made the wooden-benched cars so popular. Even the first-class passenger-list had grown more and more shady and there was something absorbing in the sight of pure white waiters serving and kow-towing to mulattoes and part-Indians in the swaying dining-car. To strangers, or at least to “gringos,” the waiters always brought the change in 200-reis nickel pieces and in silver milreis, which look almost exactly alike, carefully laid face down on the plate in the hope that a natural error would increase their tips.

I was aware of our being frequently stalled on some slight grade during the night, yet when I finally awoke, to a cold clear sunrise, we had crossed the River Iguassú into the state of Paraná, with an intertropical vegetation and many _serrarías_, or sawmills. Nearly all the morning we passed what I at first took to be small wild orange trees, some ten feet high and set in rows and trimmed, with very dark green leaves not unlike those of the elm in shape. Toward noon I learned that this was the _herva matte_, known to us as “Paraguayan tea,” and the most important product of the states of Santa Catharina and Paraná, as cattle are of Rio Grande do Sul and coffee of São Paulo. The gathering season was now at hand, but had not begun because the woods were full of revolutionists, an argument between the two _matte_-growing states having given a good excuse to several hundred bandits whom the pusillanimous central government showed no ability to cope with during all my stay in Brazil.

The _herva matte_ is an evergreen shrub of the holly family, averaging twelve feet in height, which has its habitat exclusively in the temperate regions of eastern South America at an elevation of from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet. In Paraná alone it is distributed over 150,000 square kilometers, and it is found in six other states, as well as in Paraguay and northeastern Argentine. It grows wild, and the only cultivation it needs is the cutting away of the jungle about it. Each bush produces annually some two hundred pounds of leaves and branch-ends, which are reduced to about half that amount in the “factory.” Here the sacks of dried leaves and sticks that come in from the _sertão_ go through a stamping-mill that beats them almost to a powder, after which the product is wrapped in hundred-pound lots in wet, hairy cowhides that shrink as they dry until the bundle is stone-hard. Great numbers of these deceptive looking bales may be seen at the warehouses and stations in the _matte_ states.

The descendants of the conquistadores acquired the _matte_ habit from the Guaraní Indians, and it has become not merely an antidote for an excessive meat diet but a social custom all the way from the coffee-fields of Brazil to Patagonia. In former years _herva matte_ was called “Jesuits’ tea,” for the same reason that quinine was introduced to Europe as “Jesuits’ bark,” because the disciples of Loyola first taught the Indian to gather it for trade purposes. About it has grown up a complete system of etiquette and throughout all rural southeastern South America the _matte_ bowl is the cup of greeting and of farewell; not to offer it to a visitor, even a total stranger, upon his arrival, is as serious an offense as for the visitor to refuse it. The bowl is a dry, hollow gourd about the size and shape of a large pear, into the open top of which is thrust a reed or a metal _bombilla_. Through this each person sucks the somewhat bitter brew as the gourd passes from hand to hand around the circle, amid aimless gossip in keeping with the mañana temperament of the drinkers, every third or fourth person handing it back to the servant—who is not infrequently the taciturn woman of the house herself—silently waiting with a patience possible only among Latin-Americans or real Orientals to proceed to the kitchen and refill the gourd with boiling water. _Matte_ is cheaper than tea, for though more leaves are needed for an infusion, they can be several times re-steeped without loss in flavor and strength. Narcotic in its influence, it has none of the after-effects of tea or coffee, but has on the contrary many medicinal properties, being a blood purifier, tonic, laxative, febrifuge, and stimulant to the digestive organs. The per capita consumption of _matte_ in the state of Paraná is ten pounds a year, vast quantities being exported; but, strangely enough, it has never made its way outside South America, though foreigners who have lived there come to demand it as loudly as the natives.

The stations were usually mere stops at the foot of knolls on which were larger or smaller clearings and a few paintless new shanties among the scanty trees and charred logs that marked the beginning of man’s hand-to-hand struggle with the rampant wilderness. Line after line of the dark green parasol-pine-trees lay one behind the other to where they grew blue-black on the far horizon. The increasing density of the jungle was but one of many signs that we were gradually approaching the real tropics. Each night the sun sank blood-red into the boundless _sertão_, the symmetrical pine-trees standing out against the still faintly blushing sky after all else had turned black, the moon a silver blotch through the rising mist, out of which the sunrise broke each morning and spread swiftly across the still trackless wilderness.

One afternoon there appeared along a densely green tree-topped ridge in the midst of rolling half-prairie the reddish-white town of Ponta Grossa. Here the railway broke its rule and carried the train up to the place, instead of leaving the climbing to the passengers themselves. Vast brown vistas opened up as we rose to the level of the town, picturesque with those brick-and-mud buildings and tile roofs which appear so quickly wherever forest and lumber die out. Somewhere I had acquired a letter of introduction to a merchant in Ponta Grossa. I found him a lady-like little old man with evidences of some Indian ancestry, who had traveled in Europe and was in close touch with the affairs of the outside world, courteous and cultured, yet who still clung to the Moorish-Iberian custom of considering his home a harem. For though I should much rather have had a glimpse of Brazilian family life, he permitted me to dine at the hotel and then insisted on spending thousands of _reis_ for a carriage in which to drive me about town. No Turkish seraglio is more jealous of its privacy than the average Brazilian household; the brief explanation that “there are women there” is considered ample excuse for any apparent lack of hospitality to men. When we had visited the sawmills, the _matte_ “factory,” and the waterworks-to-be of Ponta Grossa, my outdoor host insisted on driving me down to the train, asserting that the scant half-mile was too far to walk, and saw me off even to the extent of buying a platform ticket and dismissing me with an embrace and a basket of tangerines from his own garden.

This time I had taken the branch line that runs a hundred and twenty miles eastward to Curityba, capital of the state of Paraná, with an elevation of nearly three thousand feet. It had all the earmarks of an up-to-date city,—electric-lights and clanging street-cars, automobiles and uniformed policemen, a large brewery to emphasize the German element, though other Europeans were more conspicuous. Shops and offices opened late, the dusting being barely commenced by nine, while schools, as everywhere in Brazil, began at ten-thirty, a splendid training in indolence for after life. It is often asserted that the predominance of the white race is some day assured in southern Brazil, that all the country below São Paulo bids fair to become a land of blonds. It will scarcely be a pure white race, however, though the mixture that is constantly going on makes it difficult to guess what the final amalgam will be. Curityba certainly had no color-line prejudices. Here a coal-black negro girl and a rosy-cheeked young Swedish woman lolled in a doorway gossiping and laughing together like bosom companions; a Pole with a negro wife showed off his mulatto children as if he were proud of their quaint mahogany complexions; tow-headed Polish brides on the arm of jet-black grooms stared proudly out upon the passer-by from the windows of photograph galleries. Attractive blond girls of twenty strolled the streets in bare legs and slippers as nonchalantly as the slovenly race among whom they had been thrown; women from eastern Europe, their heads covered with kerchiefs and driving little wagonettes filled with country produce, halted to pass the time of day with African street loafers; once I passed a girls’ school in which a teacher who was almost an albino had an arm thrown affectionately about another who would have been invisible against a blackboard.

Nearly half of Brazil consists of an immense plateau between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, falling abruptly into the Atlantic and gradually flattening away northwestward into the great Amazon basin. Though it is somewhat larger than the United States without its dependencies, Brazil has almost no mountains except an insignificant range along the coast, and almost no lakes. Many of its rivers rise very near the Atlantic, but instead of breaking through the low coast range they flow inland, those in the southern part of the country finally emptying into the Plata and those beyond the divide into the Amazon.

The branch line to Curityba descends from this plateau to Paranaguá on the coast, the first-class coach bringing up the rear of a daily afternoon train as mixed as the passengers it carried. We creaked laboriously through heavy forests toward a fantastic mountain sky-line far to the east, some of the vistas as striking as if we had been approaching the Andes. Headlong streams and panoramas of tangled hills awakened the vagabond spirit within and tempted me to cast aside ease and respectability and plunge into the wilderness out of sight and sound of jangling civilization. For a time we followed a rivulet, our little wood-burning Baldwin spitting showers of sparks and cinders back upon us; then all at once there opened out down a great gorge the first vista since I had crossed the Andes from Chile of what might unhesitatingly be called scenery. Far below lay a vast, rolling, heavily wooded, almost mountainous world, little white towns here and there contrasting with the distance-blue of the greenness, while farther off faintly seen lagoons were backed by other densely blue-black hills.

Suddenly the stream we had been following dropped headlong down a great face of rock at a speed we dared not follow, breaking itself into white cascades that repeated themselves a score of times before it disappeared in the chartless wilderness. The train crawled cautiously along the edge of precipices, circling slowly in vast curves in and out of the wooded mountain that grew ever higher above us. Through tunnels and rock-cuttings, across viaducts and lofty iron bridges, around constricted loops where the train seemed to be pursuing its own tail, like a frolicsome puppy, along stone-faced bottomless precipices we pursued our descent, with the infinite caution of extremely old people. A softness crept into the breeze; the feminine breath of the tropics caressed our cheeks; the intense respiration of the jungle took to droning in our ears. The vast, blue, wooded world far below, with its white towns, its mirroring lagoons, its mysterious hazy recesses, gradually yet imperceptibly climbed to meet us, while the breakneck cliffs grew up beside us into sheer walls that seemed utterly unscalable. It surely needed a man of vision to stare up at that precipitous mountainside and decide that he could climb it with a railroad.

The short but decided descent of three thousand feet ended at length in the somber, velvety valleys of Paranaguá, and the train calmed down from its nervous tension into a mood more in keeping with the indolent, tropical-wooded, sea-level world. It had suddenly become stickily warm. Clothing that had often felt too thin on the plateau above grew incredibly heavy, and as final proof that we had entered the real tropics there fell upon us a sudden languid indifference to progress, and we loitered about each station doing nothing for an unconscionable length of time. Old women and boys, dressed in a few odd scraps of garments wandered about with baskets of oranges, tangerines, and bananas, but acted as if it were not of the slightest importance to them whether the stuff was sold or not, as the baby did not need a new pair of shoes anyway and it would be much less of a bore if school did not keep at all. What a different philosophy of life the tropics bring even to the man from temperate climes, and how quickly! Up on the plateau I had become almost gloomy over a hole that had begun to appear in the sole of a shoe; down here it seemed of so slight importance that all memory of it quickly drifted out of my mind. There came a sunset like a dozen pots of assorted paints kicked over by a mule, and dense, humid, tropical night settled swiftly down upon us like an impenetrable pall.

Paranaguá, a typical tropical seaport, is not on the sea at all but on the narrow neck of one of those many lagoons stretching along the coast of southern Brazil. For some time I wandered about town, barely able to see the next footstep before me in the clinging, crape-like darkness. I had a letter to a once well-known New York newspaper correspondent who had reformed and gone to raising bananas, but he was not in town, and though I talked with him by telephone I did not deliver the missive. For it would have required twenty-four hours of travel by launch, canoe, and ox-cart to reach the plantation where he was holding open house for the vice president of the state and other solemnities, my evening clothes had long since been misplaced and ... and anyway what’s the use of doing anything in the tropics? It is so much easier to let things drift along until it is too late. Finally, in the back room of a café, I ran across several American residents engaged in the universal tropical pastime of mixing whiskey with soda water. One of them headed the electric light and bathtub syndicate of Paranaguá, neither of which improvements on primitive society seemed to require his exclusive attention, for he had time to cultivate genuine hospitality. Much talk, whiskey, soda, and local beer had been consumed, however, before I managed to get in a hint containing the word food. The Americans led me to the thoroughly tropical establishment of a “Turk” who had once graced the United States with his presence and who had there learned to concoct real ham and eggs—with the slight exception of not soaking the salt out of the ham and of frying the eggs to a frazzle. Here the consumption of words continued until it was discovered that all the hotels, which were unspeakable places anyway, had closed, and that I would do much better to put up with the hospitable bathtub man. We waded through the dense humid night, not to mention many acres of loose sand and veritable streams of dew, to the outskirts of the sand-and-woods scattered town, where I was soon introduced to an enormous double bed in the plantation house of slave days which my fellow-countryman was guarding for the absentee owner.

Seen by daylight, Paranaguá has a very ancient stone customhouse, now a barracks and once a Jesuit monastery, with the customary tradition of an underground passage from it to an island a few miles out in the shallow lagoon. There was one statue in town, a bronze bust among magnificent royal palm-trees of “our dear Professor Sulano, who taught us all we know and died in 1904, erected by his grateful pupils.” My own memory is treacherous, but will some bright pupil kindly name the American cities which have busts of the high school principal in front of the municipal group? Dugout canoes full of oranges were drawn up on the beach, and fish of every imaginable size, shape, and variety were offered for sale. The population was of that mongrel sort that I was due to find throughout Brazil wherever European colonists have not appeared in any great number. It was not until ten that the sun had drunk up the vast banks of cheese-thick mists that hang often over this corner of the world, and then the humidity remained to help the despotic red sun that burst upon us emphasize the advantage of a bathing-suit over customary garb. Yet even the American residents insisted on wearing full Broadway dress of heavy black suits with vests, topped with derbies! To appear in less, they explained, would be to disgrace their native land and to lose all dignity in the eyes of the natives, though such garb was probably one of the reasons why they seemed so lifeless and could under no provocation be enticed into the crushing sunshine.

By mid-afternoon the train began to wind itself back up to the Brazilian plateau, the air taking on a refreshing coolness the moment we began to climb. Next morning, when I was pulled out of bed in Curityba in time to catch the 5:30 train back to the main line, on which a broken nap in an uncomfortable seat was chiefly dreams about icebergs, I would have given anything within reason for one of those scorned hours in Paranaguá. At every station where we stopped for more than an instant all passengers tumbled off to partake of coffee. For a woman or man of the vicinity was sure to have a table in the shade of the station, with many little white cups that were filled with thick black coffee as the travelers deluged upon them. The Brazilian who is not permitted to drop off at least once an hour and drink from one to four such cups at a _tostão_ (a hundred reis) each, and rush back to the train again as the warning bell rings, would feel that he was being cheated of his birthright.

My next stop was at a houseless siding just south of the boundary line of São Paulo state. Here is the “Fazenda Morongava,” where the railway and its attendant corporation runs a model ranch in charge of a Texas Scotchman, a central point of the ten million acres it owns in Brazil and Bolivia. An official telegram had ordered the conductor to set me down there, when I discovered that the private car hitched on behind us was filled with guests of the company, and was due to be sidetracked at the same spot. It was after midnight that I awoke to hear the porter carrying out his instructions to tell the switchman to show me up to the _fazenda_ buildings, more than a mile away over rocky hills—and to note with dismay that my newly appointed guide had a wooden leg! But a huge form loomed up out of the brightly moonlighted night and I was soon rolling away over the hills with a Colorado cattleman in a two-wheeled gig toward a huge farmhouse built half a century ago in slave times and now surrounded by several other and more modern buildings.

The private-car party was already scattered over the landscape from breakfast-room to champion-pig sty when I awoke, to be at once invited to wage battle with a genuine American breakfast ranging all the way from honest-to-goodness bacon, made on the _fazenda_, but unknown in Brazil at large, down to hot cakes. Unfortunately I had so long before lost both the habit and the opportunity of battling with American breakfasts that I was quickly floored, in spite of being cheered on by the genuine American housewife in charge. But my lack of endurance was fully made up for by the last of the private-car party to leave the table, a man who had been sent down by a Chicago packing-house to start a similar establishment in São Paulo. In all my travels I have never met his equal at mixing the flesh of “hawgs” with eggs and hot biscuits and butter and coffee and hot cakes, whether the feat be considered from the point of view of quantity or speed. During his championship exhibition he bemoaned the fact that, though he was barely forty, he had suffered greatly in walking up the hill from the car that morning, and for the life of him he could not understand how he had become so fat, since as a farm boy twenty years before he had been “lean as a rail.”

In addition to this exhibit our “house party” included a French chairman of the board of directors of the railways of southern Brazil, who had run over for nine days to learn all about them before going to Persia on a similar mission. Besides his staff, several uncatalogued hangers-on, and the family of the manager, there was the American ranch personnel, ranging from the fat and jolly _fazenda_ doctor who drove constantly about the estate in a sulky behind racing mules, to a score of boss cowboys who shocked the Europeans and Brazilians by addressing everyone, be he manager, packing-house expert, or chairman of the board of directors, in exactly the same manner,—“What, ain’t you fellers been down to the barn yet? Y’ ought ’a shake a leg an’ see them there new heifers we jes’ got in.” Now and then we caught a fleeting glimpse of the real servant body, the native laborers, cattle herders, and gauchos, who “knew their place” in the European-Brazilian sense and whom the manager had cured of the time-honored custom of alternating three working days a week with four days of drunken festivity by “firing” on a moment’s notice and establishing the fixed rule that “if there’s to be any dhrinkin’ on this ranch, I’ll do it myself.” The peons and native cowboys were paid from fifty to a hundred thousand reis a month, and “found,” and with local prohibition in force and gambling scowled upon—to their mind inexplicable “gringo” idiosyncrasies—they were often hard put to it to get rid of their money.

Not being overwhelmingly interested in “hawgs,” I accepted the invitation of a boss cowboy and rode nearly all day among the hillside pastures. The degenerate tropical animal under it was not exactly my idea of the noun equus, but the Texas saddle was all a saddle should be, and a great improvement on others I had bestridden in South America. The cattle included crosses between native cows and zebu bulls, which had turned out lanky and of poor butcher’s quality, though they withstood the heat and ticks better than pedigree stock. We saw several fleet deer, visited a great canyon with a waterfall, the striking of which on a ledge of rock hundreds of feet below gave an intermittent sound like that of a compound engine puffing up a stiff grade, and had a native dinner, at an isolated American cowboy’s shack, of rice, black beans, and _farinha_ (a coarse meal made of ground mandioca, used to stiffen soups or eaten dry all over Brazil), topped off by coffee and hot biscuits. Magnificent panoramas rolling away into blue distances opened out as we jogged up and down over the great folds of earth. Though it was midwinter, it was so only in name, and the climate could scarcely have been improved upon. The hottest that had ever been recorded here was 84 degrees, and 70 was the lowest of a winter day, while the fresh cool nights required a blanket the year round.

The Americans, from the manager down, were agreed that all the land of southern Brazil was of excellent fertility. It was better where there was timber, but the _campo_, which the natives will not try to cultivate because it does not yield immediate results, will also produce in abundance almost any temperate or semi-tropical crop, if it is worked a year or two to let the air into it and is sufficiently manured to offset the two per cent. of iron which makes the soil so red. Not the least of the advantages over the floor-flat pampas, from the grazier’s point of view, was the rolling character of the ground. With hollows and ravines there were no floods, yet always water, so that the cattle did not wear themselves out in the dry season by wandering in search of it. Thousands of head of stock were born, raised, and driven to slaughter in the same hollow, the country being often not even wire-fenced. All were enthusiastic over southern Brazil as a land of promise for white colonists with youth, health, a little patience, who were willing to earn their living from the soil instead of “sponging” on others, after the fashion of the natives; and all considered the Argentine overestimated, just now in the limelight, but with no such great future before it as southern Brazil.

I continued my journey in the private-car of my fellow-guests, which was picked up by the tri-weekly train some time during the second night. When the sun again rose above the horizon, we found ourselves in the richest and most famous state of Brazil, the coffee-growing land of São Paulo. Our coach had been hooked on directly behind the engine, ahead of the baggage-car, so that we had to get off to reach the dining-car—whereby hangs a tale. The “hawg” man and I reached there together, without his interpreter, whose place I had to take and explain at great length why any man, least of all one whose façade quaked as he walked, could not be satisfied with small cakes and coffee, like reasonable human beings, instead of demanding eggs and _toucinho_—which means bacon in a Portuguese dictionary but salt pork in a Brazilian mind—and getting into a rage because there was none of the latter on board and commanding a large steak in its place. Then, as if that were not trouble enough, my famished ward proved himself a poor traveler in Brazil by complaining vociferously just because one poor little fly got cooked with his eggs. It may have been my fault, too; for I had not yet grown accustomed to the Spanish letter “l” becoming an “r” in Portuguese, and no doubt, speaking with a Castilian accent, I inadvertently ordered flied eggs.

Sorocaba was the largest town of the day’s journey, and with it the cruder rural section, the rude wooden houses of new colonists, and the parasol pine-trees largely disappeared, while palms increased. Nowhere from Montevideo northward had I seen an acre of sterile land, though certainly not one-tenth of what I had seen was under cultivation. On a pole before each house now was a white banner with the likeness of a saint, which had hung there since St. Peter’s Day a fortnight before. The railroad made a complete circle around São Roque in its deep lap of hills, and gradually, in mid-afternoon, there grew up a constant succession of villages. We passed groups of unquestionably city people, and presently São Paulo itself burst upon us, far away and strewn up along, over, and about a dry and treeless ridge. Then it disappeared again for quite a time, while the villages changed to urban scenes, streets began to take on names, electric-cars to spin along beside us, endless lines of light-colored houses of concrete with red-tile roofs appeared, and at last we came to a halt in a great glass-vaulted modern station in the second city of Brazil—second, that is, in population, for it is first in energy and industry, capital of the most progressive state of the union and the first real city on the main line north of Montevideo.

Swinging my trunk under one arm, I set out to find a lodging in keeping with my sadly depleted pocketbook. The first part of that task was in no way difficult. Of all the cities of the earth, as far as I know it, perhaps only Paris has more hotels, _pensões_, and lodging-houses per capita than São Paulo. There seemed to be at least one for every half-dozen possible guests. In all but the best of them there were two or more beds in each room, as if they some day expected to have a veritable flood of clients; but this prospective congestion mattered little, for they rarely had anyone to share the room, though they doubled the bill if one asked to have a room alone. When it came to considering these accommodations on the score of cost, however, the task of a man with a flattened pocketbook was serious, for the prices in the poorest “doss-house” were appalling. Democracy and popular education, even their pale reflections, seem to bring with them the cult of the white collar, which grows more fervent as one approaches the equator; hence scores of muscular Spanish and Portuguese immigrants had opened hotels in São Paulo who should have been out planting corn or hoeing coffee. Competition is not always a benefit. The hotels of São Paulo were atrocious in price and poor in quality precisely because there was so much competition, scores of hotel-keepers, each with runners, touts, and a host of hangers-on, trying to make a fortune in six months out of the three or four guests a week which fate sent them, that they might return to end their days at ease in the land of their birth. For it was not the native _Paulistas_ who ran the countless hostelries of all classes, but easy-fortune seekers from overseas.

The English writer Southey, who wrote a six-volume history of Brazil, complained of the “tremendous ascents” and the thinness of the air on the plateau of São Paulo—with its elevation of nearly 2,500 feet! Certainly the man who has rambled about the Andes feels only gratitude for that altitude, which lifts him above the sweltering heat of the coastlands. Even to the casual observer, however, there seems no other fitting reason for founding a city at this particular spot, and one is quickly driven to printed authority to account for such taste. In 1554 the Jesuit, José de Anchietta, had gone to the town of Piratinanga to establish a school, but being dissatisfied with that village, he ordered its inhabitants, in the dogmatic Jesuit manner of those good old days, to remove to a site on the Tieté. Now the Tieté is scarcely a brook, rising on the Brazilian plateau near the Atlantic and flowing away across country to the Paraná, finally to join the Plata and pour its scanty waters into the South Atlantic. There are a dozen real rivers to the north and south of this insignificant stream and a hundred sites that would have seemed better suited to the good padre’s purpose, but the Jesuit insisted and at length the people of Piratinanga obeyed his command; and because the town that was destined to grow to be the industrial capital and the railway center of Brazil was founded on June 25, it was named St. Paul in honor of that day’s saint.

One must get some little way out of São Paulo to appreciate its situation clearly. Built on plump low hills in a rolling, treeless country, rather dry and reddish of soil, the nature of the ground gives splendid views of the town from many points of vantage, and in tramping about its environs one finds every now and then the reddish, light-colored city spread out in almost its entirety below or above him. In a general sense the city and the region about it would be called flat, yet in detail it is by no means so. The character of its site gives São Paulo an intricate network of streets, with viaducts over great gullies and street-cars passing above and under one another. The great Viaducto do Chá stands so high above the great ravine through the center of town that it is a favorite place of threatened suicide among lovesick youths.

Its unexpected position as capital and metropolis of the world’s greatest coffee-producing state has given this once bucolic country town so extraordinary a growth that the Cidade of the nineteenth century is now merely the central tangle of streets in the heart of town. From this nucleus run splendid avenues lined with a bushy species of shade-trees, and residence sections with dwellings of coffee kings, ranging all the way from sumptuous comfort to magnificent and palatial eyesores, spread away across town in various directions. São Paulo has more than half a million inhabitants, a municipal theater for opera, drama, and concerts scarcely second to any in the western hemisphere, and an up-and-coming manner which quickly establishes its claim to equality with modern cities of the temperate zone. The “Light and Power Company” runs an excellent service of open street-cars and gives the city a nightly brilliancy that is not often reached in cities of its size. Its immaculate policemen carry speckless white clubs, thrust into leather scabbards except when directing traffic. No one has ever known them to strike a man with a club, but they are at least awe-inspiring representatives of law and order.

The extraordinary activity of São Paulo is plainly due to its European immigrants,—Portuguese, Spanish, especially Italian. Whether it is because they come from the northern part of the peninsula, where sterner characters grow, or that they feel peculiarly at home in the Brazilian environment, the Italians of São Paulo stand noticeably high in the community. Many of the important business houses, some of the professions, and much of the wealth is in their hands; among the rather insignificant-looking hybrid Brazilians they are conspicuous for their better physique and greater energy. Modern and energetic though it is, however, São Paulo swarms with non-producers. At the stations crowds of able-bodied _carregadores_, paying a high municipal license and waiting most of the day in vain for an errand, try to recoup themselves by demanding a thousand reis or more for carrying the traveler’s bag across the street. The city has so many shops and hawkers and peddlers that one might easily fancy it in a densely populated country, rather than in one where land is everywhere suffering for cultivation. Countless little liquor shops are run by grasping individuals without initiative, anyone with cash or credit enough to buy a dozen bottles of liquor seeming to choose this high road to opulence. Vendors of tickets for both the national and state lotteries make day and night hideous with their uproar and crowd the principal streets with their booths; hordes of silk-clad, bejeweled French and Jewish adventuresses roll luxuriantly to and fro every afternoon in their automobiles.

The principal place of meeting for the rank and file is the _Jardim da Luz_, a “popular” park retreat of the German beer-garden style, well crowded of an evening, especially when a municipal or military band plays. Here, too, vendors of strong and weak drink are ubiquitous, their tables in the open air, their prices posted on the trees, yet demanding 500 reis for a glass of sweetened water, with the waiter still to be satisfied. Everyone moves with an almost tropical leisure, though there are evenings in this July midwinter when autumn garments are not out of place and not a few young fops affect overcoats. Yet São Paulo is, on the whole, a less showy town than one expects. Foreigners are so usual in any gathering that one attracts little notice. Though perhaps a majority of such a “popular” crowd is of the physically insignificant, negroid mixture common to much of Brazil, in the strolling throng may be seen every nationality from tow-headed Norwegian girls—about whom there are suggestions of the effects of a tropical climate and environment in slackening social morals among any race—to a Japanese out on the edge of the night, with a far-away-across-the-Pacific look in his cynical-inscrutable eyes out of all keeping with his commonplace “European” garb.

Every stroll beyond the city limits well repaid the dusty exertion. Evidently the year’s shipment of rain, like so many carelessly billed supplies from the North, had been carried past its destination, for the region about São Paulo was deadly dry at a season when it should have been verdant, and the newspapers reported the churches of Buenos Aires filled day and night with people praying that the celestial waterworks might be shut off. The cloud effects on the Brazilian plateau are so striking that São Paulo was perhaps more beautiful on a gray day than on a bright one when the glare brought out something of squalor. Out at Ypiranga on the bank of a tiny stream, where Emperor Pedro I gave the “cry of independence” that eventually shook Brazil free from Portugal, there is a remarkably good museum full of a wealth of historical material,—mementoes of the aboriginal inhabitants, splendid collections of the fauna of Brazil, hundreds of _borboletas_, or butterflies, of which the country has an incredible variety in size and color, innumerable species of _beija-flores_ (“kiss-flowers,” or humming-birds), many _pica-paos_ (“pick-sticks,” which are none other than woodpeckers); strange specimens of the vulture family known as João Velho (“Old John”).

Or the five-mile tramp out to Penha is no waste of time. The road passes through many market gardens of black soil in the bottomlands. Along the way are Italian husbandmen with wide heavy mattocks, Sicilian stocking-caps like the chorus of “Cavalleria Rusticana” on their heads, Egyptian water-dips on poles with American oil-cans as buckets, Gallego ox-carts with solid wooden wheels and axles that shriek along the highway, much cabbage and lettuce, a few potatoes, grapes, baskets of strawberries almost the year round. Pack-mules and the raucous cry of muleteers plodding soft-footed in the dust behind them, one person to each milk-can of a gallon or two, carrying it on his head to town, there to sell it by the cupful—no wonder milk costs its weight in silver—and much more may be seen spread out across the reddish landscape bounded by the low rolling hills, light-wooded in places and distance-blue in color, of the coast range. The town of Penha is pitched on the summit of a knoll with a striking view of São Paulo, five miles away, and a shrine to which the pious flock in great numbers. Inside the otherwise uninteresting church is an ornate Virgin who is credited with miraculous cures, and her chamber overflows with evidences of gratitude from her devotees,—hundreds of pictures by native “artists,” atrocious photographs of accidents posed for after they had taken place, that the miraculously rescued victim might carry out the promise made in the heat of fear to the Virgin, the latter always represented somewhere in the upper right-hand corner of the picture in the act of saving the devotee from appalling sudden death in the very nick of time. Here a fat man is being snatched from beneath the wheels of a heavy truck, there a baby is shown safely deposited on the fender of a street-car, or a countryman falling from his horse is landing upright with divine assistance. Far more numerous than these pictorial atrocities, however, are the wax imitations of all parts of the body. A sign on the wall announced that “only things that are decent may be shown in the miracle room,” but words have not the same meanings in different climes and races, and little was left to the imagination, though no doubt the rule cuts down appreciably the material evidences of cures. How widespread is superstition and the fostering of it even in the progressive state of São Paulo is shown by the fact that a month fills the room to overflowing. During the few minutes I was there a man brought a wax foot, a buxom young woman a breast, and a mulatto crone a hand which no doubt was meant to represent one of her own, though it was snow-white except where she had painted a red streak across the back to indicate the portion she wished, or had already had, cured. But the Virgin of Penha draws no color-line, for her own complexion is by no means strictly Caucasian, and her quadroon swarthiness no doubt gives the average of her devotees a comfortable feeling of racial propinquity.

Most famous, perhaps, of all the sights in and about São Paulo is the “Instituto Butantan,” known among the English-speaking residents as the “snake farm.” A mile walk out beyond the Pinheiros car-line brings one to this important and well-conducted establishment, first started by private initiative but now receiving government aid. On the crest of a knoll are several concrete buildings and about them scores of snake-houses, half-spherical cement structures some four feet high inclosed in sections by low walls and moats, where thousands of snakes lie basking in the sun. By Brazilian law any public carrier must transport free of charge from its place of capture to the “snake farm” of São Paulo any new species of snake discovered. There are one hundred and eighty known species of reptile in Brazil—the Portuguese word for snake, by the way, is _cobra_—of which ten are known to be venomous; in other words when a snake appears even in Brazil there is only one chance in eighteen that his bite is harmful, and the odds are eighteen to one that he is just a harmless fellow who wants to cuddle up in your lap for company. But the venomous ones are venomous indeed. There is the deadly _cascavel_, or rattlesnake, the _jararaca_, worst of all the _jararaca de rabo branco_, the _jararaca_ with a white tail. Aside from its mere museum or “zoo” function, the “Instituto Butantan” has two very practical purposes. Three serums are made here for snakebites and sent to all parts of the republic, remedies that have saved the life of many a _sertanejo_ dwelling in wilderness isolation back in the _sertões_ of Brazil, where an ignorant pill-peddler, who calls himself “_doutor_,” but whose training as a physician is largely imaginary, sometimes appears not more than once or twice a year. The venomous snakes are required to furnish their own antidote. A uniformed negro attendant springs over the low wall and moat into an inclosure of dangerous snakes, pins one to the ground with a sort of iron cane, picks it up by the throat with his bare hands, and forces it to spit its yellowish venom into a piece of cheesecloth drawn tight over the opening of a glass receptacle. Healthy young mules are inoculated with this, and the serum produced in much the same way as smallpox vaccine.

The second purpose of the institute is to breed and distribute the _mussurama_. This is a native black snake sometimes reaching eight feet in length, entirely harmless to man but which feeds exclusively on other snakes, venomous ones by preference. Within the moats that inclose this species are many others which only repeated assurance would convince the novice are not dangerous. The non-venomous snakes are in general larger than the others, and may also be distinguished by the lack of any special tail, being, as it were, all of one piece. If the employees of the institute, from the scientists in charge of serum-making to the negro snake-herders, are to be believed, there are other differences: the harmless snakes lay eggs, while the others produce their young alive; the former must be fed, and the latter have never been caught taking nourishment since the institute was started. Some of the harmless _cobras_ attain considerable size, though by no means any such as they do in popular jungle tales. The largest in captivity at São Paulo was a species of constrictor about sixteen feet long and as large around as a rain-pipe. They vary widely, too, in habits. The _sucurý_ is huge, clumsy, and sluggish; a large brown snake in the same inclosure was almost lightning-like in its movements, snapping at the flap of the attendant’s trousers and returning to the attack with incredible swiftness as often as the latter threw him away with his crooked iron stick. Like so many really harmless creatures he is evidently given his vicious temper to make up for the lack of any real defense. This reptile is said to follow for miles any creature that angers it, and though its bite is harmless, only a man with long experience or iron nerve could resist taking to his heels when this personification of speed and anger dashes upon him with its great jaws wide open. All such species, however, are mere souvenirs of the _sertão_, of no other use than to keep company for the _mussurama_, great numbers of which are sent to the snake-infested areas of Brazil as rapidly as they attain mature size.

On my second or third visit, after I had won his gratitude with my kodak, the chief snake-herder arranged a special snake-eating contest. Into a moated compound of _mussuramas_ he threw a _jararaca de rabo branco_, the most deadly snake of Brazil. Far from pouncing upon the newcomer, the black cannibals gave it no attention whatever. The attendant stepped over the wall and introduced the visitor to his hosts one by one. The first turned up his nose at it, which drew forth the information that this one had eaten only a week before and was not yet hungry. The second had not dined for at least a fortnight. No sooner had the _jararaca_ been tossed near him than he sprang forward and wound himself about the other so rapidly that the eye could not follow the individual movements, kinking and knotting him in an intricate entanglement in which only their difference in color distinguished one slimy body from the other. The two snakes were almost of a size, about three feet long. The _jararaca_ writhed in agony, opened his huge mouth with its two ugly looking fangs on the upper jaw, and struck hard into the black body of his opponent, the yellow venom running down over his scales. The only response of the oppressor was to increase the entanglement until the head of the _jararaca_ was confined in a coil, as his own was protected within the folds of his own body.

For more than twenty minutes after his first sudden movements the _mussurama_ scarcely moved a scale. I began to think he had gone to sleep again. Then gradually, imperceptibly, almost as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock moves, he withdrew his own head from the coil that had protected it, looked cautiously about to see whether danger threatened, then moving one muscle at a time, with the patience of a professional wrestler, he worked his frog-mouth sidewise slowly along the body of the _jararaca_ until he reached the neck. Pulling the head carefully out of its confining coil, he crushed it flat by slow pressure of his powerful mouth. Only then did he appear satisfied and at ease. Disentangling himself, he began to swallow the _jararaca_ head first, working his way along it in successive bites at about the speed with which a lady might put on the finger of a new glove, now and then wriggling his body to increase its capacity. Once he stopped, rolled a bit, and took a long breath, then went steadily on until the white tail of the _jararaca_, looking for a moment like a long tongue of his own, disappeared entirely, perhaps four minutes from the time the swallowing had begun, and the snake that was left where two had been before crawled lazily away to his cement house for a fortnight’s sleep.

I remained for some time in São Paulo not only because it proved to be a city worth exploring, but because I had come to the end of my railroad passes, and unless I could discover a new source of supply I faced the painful and unusual experience of having to pay my fare. To tell the truth, so weary had I become of train riding and respectability that I found myself planning to slip into my oldest clothes, pick up a fellow-beachcomber, and take to the road for the three hundred and twenty miles left to Rio. But short samples convinced me that such a walk would not prove entirely a pleasure jaunt and railway passes evidently do not grow on São Paulo bushes. I was forced, therefore, to fall back on my own slender funds. There is frequent and comfortable service from São Paulo to Rio four times a day in twelve hours by day or night on the government railway, but a more pleasant as well as cheaper route appeared to be that by way of Santos and an ocean steamer; moreover, it seemed more fitting to enter the far-famed harbor of the Brazilian capital by the harbor’s mouth than to sneak in at the back door by the government railway.

An excellent express of the British “São Paulo Railway Company” left the industrial capital at eight in the morning and raced thirty of the fifty miles to Santos across level country in less than an hour. Then we halted at Alto da Serra for the inevitable coffee and a new engine. This was small and inclosed within a sort of car with glass-protected observation platform, for almost the only work required of it was to hook us, two cars at a time, to a cable running on large upright wheels between the rails, two small trains counterbalancing each other at opposite ends of the cable making little motive power necessary. Just beyond was the _abertura_, the “opening” or jumping-off place, where the world suddenly spread out far below, some of it visible, some hidden by vast banks of mist slowly melting under the torrid sun. The cable let us down more than two thousand feet in a very few miles, the descending and ascending trains passing each other automatically on a switch halfway down. The road was so swift that the buildings along the way seemed sharply tilted uphill, but though the valley was densely wooded with scrub growth, it was only a narrow one, so that while the engineering feat may be as remarkable, the scenery was by no means equal to the descent to Paranaguá. It took as long to lower us to Piassagüera in its banana-fields, only eight miles without stops, as it had to cover the thirty miles with several halts from São Paulo to the opening of the range. This road, over which virtually all the coffee grown in Brazil starts to the outside world, is reputed to be one of the richest concessions on earth, though its charter restricts its net profits to a certain percentage of the invested capital, the rest going to the government. The company has always had great difficulty in devising ways and means to spend its surplus earnings and keep them from falling into the public coffers. It is rumored that all the switch-lamps are silver-plated. The latest plan of the harassed directors is to electrify the road, but to the casual observer this would seem exceedingly unwise, for heavy coffee trains coasting down the hill might store up electricity enough to run the entire road, and with no more coal to buy at the breath-taking price of that commodity in Brazil the problem of spending their surplus would become hopeless.

Santos is even older than São Paulo, having been founded by Thomé de Souza two years earlier. Not so long ago it was a pesthole, noted especially for its yellow fever. Those unpleasant days are forever gone, though it is still not a health resort and many of its people prefer to live in São Paulo and come down daily on business. If it was not always raining in torrents during my stay there, at least it was overhung by a soggy, humid heat that had nothing in common with the cool, clear atmosphere of São Paulo. Such air as arises in Santos drags its way sluggishly through the streets, and there was a heavy, blue-mood temperament about the place quite unlike the larger city up the hill.

This languid, gloomy mood pervaded even the club in which a group of Americans sit all day long, day after day, “mopping up booze,” exchanging the chips that pass in the night, and buying coffee. The last is their appointed task, but it is a light one. Every now and then a dealer or a native messenger comes in with a name, a price, and one or two other hieroglyphics scratched on a slip of paper; one of the buyers lays aside his cards long enough to “o.k.” it, and the deed is done. Santos exports a million dollars’ worth of produce to the United States each year, “about one hundred per cent. of which is coffee.” When one compares the retail price of this commodity in the American market with what the planters of São Paulo state get for it, the wonder arises as to where the difference goes. Some of it, of course, goes to the world-weary men who spend their days exchanging chips at the club in Santos; transportation takes its full share; a high ad valorem export tax goes to the federal government; a similar impost of five francs a sack goes to the State of São Paulo; the municipalities through which it passes do not allow themselves to be forgotten; the European builders of the port improvements exact their generous pound of flesh; and “official charges” thrust out a curved palm at every step, so that whoever drinks coffee helps generously to support the plethora of mulatto politicians of Brazil. Yet even then the State of São Paulo is not satisfied with the price paid for its principal product and in order that this may fall no lower prohibitive taxes now make it impossible to lay out new coffee plantations within the state.

In all the business section of Santos there are pungently scented warehouses in which coffee is picked over by hand by women and children whose knowledge of sanitary principles is embryonic; while down at the wharves the coffee-porters give the town a picturesque touch. Long lines of European laborers, dressed in undershirt, cotton trousers, a cloth belt, and a tight skull-cap, all more or less ragged, discolored and soaked with sweat, trot from train to warehouse or from warehouse to ship, each with a sack of coffee set up on his neck, moving with a jerk of the hips and keeping the rest of the body quite rigid. Their manners are gayer than one might expect of men constantly bearing such burdens. The law requires that each sack weigh exactly sixty kilograms, about 132 pounds, that the state may levy its tax without difficulty; and the men are paid sixty reis for every sack they carry. In the slave days of thirty years and more ago this coffee-carrying was done by African chattels, trotting in unison to the time of their melancholy-boisterous native melodies. Now there is not a drop of African blood among the carriers, though there were not a few haughty negroes in uniform sitting in the shade superintending the job and down on a tiny cruiser nearby all the sailors were of that race. The Portuguese have driven out the negro carriers by their greater strength and diligence, but they in turn are being superseded by modern improvements.

“Brazil is no good any more,” grumbled a sweat-soaked son of Lisbon with whom I spoke. “It is forbidden now to carry two sacks at a time, and these great carrier-belts they are putting in, as well as the auto-trucks, are robbing us of our livelihood.”

Santos has now grown almost wholly around a steep, rocky hill that was once on its outskirts, spreading in wide, right-angled streets lined by pretentious light-colored dwellings to the seashore, with several large bathing-season hotels and many fine beaches along the scalloped coast. Up at the top of this hill in the center of the flat modern town is an ancient place of pilgrimage known as the “Santuario de Nossa Senhora de Monte Serrat,” overflowing, like that of Penha, with wax imitations of cures. Prices were distressingly high in Santos. Bananas, which overload the landscape about the town, cost 600 reis each in any restaurant; and all else was in proportion. No doubt milk must be sold at 32 cents a quart in a town where the milkmen drive about in luxurious go-carts, dressed as if on their way to a wedding. But such things are painful to the wanderer who has already begun to doubt his ability to pay his way home from the next port, particularly when he finds that for once there is no steamer bound thither for several days, and that the fare for the overnight sea-trip is half as much as that to Europe.

It was too late to change my plans and make the journey to Rio by rail, however, and I made the best of the delay by joining a Sunday excursion to Guarajá, a beach with a Ritz-Carlton hotel that was being “boomed” a few miles out through the wilderness. A little steamer carried us from the Santos docks to a station across the harbor, from which a tiny steam railroad runs off through the jungle. The benches were hard, the toy engine incessantly spat smoke, cinders, and fire back upon us, and a woman of the laboring class was jammed into close, popular-excursion contact with me throughout the journey. But the beach of Guarajá was fine and hard, and the day brilliant and clear. Chalets, bandstands, and all the Palm Beach paraphernalia recalled the season of six to eight weeks during which coffee kings and their mistresses hold high revel and yield the promoters a good year’s profit on their investment. Natives, both men and women, had here and there rolled up their trousers or the feminine counterpart and gone wading, but evidently it was not considered the proper season to swim, for all the heat of midwinter July, or else the community had the customary South American fear of “wetting the body all over.” Gringos may always take their own risks, however, and by dint of long inquiry I found I could get an ill-fitting bathing-suit and the key to a bathhouse, all for a mere 2000 reis, and I went in alone.

It was the first time I had been in or upon the sea since entering South America way up on the gulf of Panama more than two years before. I plunged in and was soon diving under the combers and enjoying myself hugely, when I suddenly found that I could not touch bottom, and that the more I tried the less I touched. This would not have mattered had I not realized by some indefinable sense that I was not only in an ebbing tide but that I was caught in an undertow which was dragging me swiftly seaward. The buildings and the excursionists on the shore were growing slowly but steadily smaller. I waved an arm above the water and attracted the attention of a group of men, but it was evident by their indecisive actions that they were “Spigs” and that no help would come from that quarter, though they might be of use in testifying before the coroner’s jury. Among the Sunday crowd on the shore and the hotel veranda arose more stir than I had yet caused anywhere in Brazil, and the bathhouse attendant who had taken the 2000 reis away from me rushed down to the spray’s edge frantically waving his arms. For the next twenty minutes or so I had visions of navigating the high seas without a ship, but as I did not confine myself during that time to smiling at the vision, but took to performing superhuman feats of swimming, I was suddenly surprised, not to say relieved, to feel my feet strike sand, and what might have been a coroner’s inquest turned out to be nothing but a lesson for the foolhardy. When I returned to dress, the attendant said that he had forgotten to tell me that certain parts of this beach had a very dangerous undertow. Posthumous information was to be expected of a Brazilian; but when the American of Santos who had suggested my spending the Sunday at Guarajá replied to my mention of the entirely personal incident, while we were lunching at the Sportsman Café next day—at his expense—with “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you that is the most dangerous beach in South America, hardly a Sunday passes without someone drowning there,” I could not but thank him fervently for his kind warning.

The steamer of the Spanish line owned by the Jesuits spent most of Tuesday in “leaving within five minutes,” during which the passengers all but succumbed to uproar, congestion, and perspiration. I found myself packed into a tiny two-berth cabin with two other travelers whom I should not naturally have chosen as companions; nowhere was there a spot clean and large enough on which to sit down. Once a _refresco_, a glass of sickly sweetened water, was served to us as a special favor just before we choked to death, and finally about five in the afternoon we let go the wharf, made a nearly complete circle with the “river” on which Santos is located, and dipping our flag to its last fort, were soon out on the high seas, the roll of which I had almost forgotten.