V. CHILEAN LANDSCAPES…

V. CHILEAN LANDSCAPES

Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side.

This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all Chile. The roto who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train, who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country. With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel. The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos Aires.

The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of cités or conventillos, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded, unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country.

The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of “saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous, doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral; the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list of imposing buildings. Long galerías, roofed passages that are virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings, and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom.

Of late years many of these old families have found that they can materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been almost wholly obliterated. Under the portales of a palatial, red-brick building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands, uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are sold the favorite dishes of the gente de medio pelo, the ragged masses,—mote molido (boiled and mashed ripe corn); mote con huesillos (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the thick, greasy soup known as cazuela. The half-trained tailors, to whom no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively mujeres de manto, dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of color adding to the general gloom of the town.

In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce, drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza. The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the alpargatas, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called hojotas common to the roto class. Some of these countrymen come riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the morning hideous with their deliveries.

It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all, have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has broken the ice of costumbre, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early and often to tuberculosis.

Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy, soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required by the human system that I recall having run across in South America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a Protestant church is a church, even in Chile.

Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising “Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism.

Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward, the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass, readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the intellectuales of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat, lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his fellow-intellectuales, for it would have been attacking one of their most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence from the more humble origin.

There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of futres, bomberos, and rotos. The first are well-dressed street-corner loafers; the bomberos are volunteer firemen, and the rotos form the ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The latter, said never to be without the corvo, an ugly curved knife, with which they are quick to tripear, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous, but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood. Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of the Mercurio office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and slouches are the rule among the female division of the roto class, and Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. In the Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen, and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them decidedly from the people of eastern South America.

Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which the ostensibly free-voting roto has little real hand. The “best families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the voter must be able to read and write, and any roto whom the landlords do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the roto not only free of speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his corvo, but ready to fight for himself in more modern ways.

“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution. The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country. You have something of that problem in the United States, but the proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.”

Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable. One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside Santiago in a decade.

History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a world monopoly of nitrate, or salitre, as the Chilean calls it, the only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the “saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton, who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,” insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.”

The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he, and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less active and has less initiative than the more European argentino.

Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books, because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere ranchos to modern several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America, and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater prevalence of wooden structures.

The fires themselves would be serious enough, were there not the bomberos to make them doubly so. There are no professional fire departments in Chile. The glorious honor of fighting the flames is appropriated by the élite, much as certain regiments and squadrons are open only to a certain caste in our largest cities. The youthful males of Santiago’s “best families” become bomberos because it is considered one of their aristocratic privileges to parade before their enamored ladies in fancy uniforms and glistening brass helmets. As often as a fire bell rings, all upper-class functions are temporarily suspended and all the young bloods run—to the fire? Certainly not! They hasten home to don their splendid bombero uniforms, without which, naturally, it would be highly improper to attack the flames. The newspapers always include in their report of a fire the assertion that “the bomberos arrived with their customary promptitude,” which has the advantage of being both true and courteous.

There being no National Guard in Chile, gilded youth has no other convenient way of showing off in uniform than to join the bomberos. The regular army would be too serious an undertaking for them, even if it were not below their dignity. Moreover, this is founded on conscription, with a year’s service for those who “draw unlucky,” and as the influence of caste is powerful in manipulating the drawings, the ranks are filled almost entirely with rotos or the poorer classes. The Chilean army is German in tone and uniform, even to the big gray Prussian capes of the officers, many of whom, as well as the commander-in-chief, were of that nationality up to the outbreak of the World War. The army is much in evidence and its splendor is in great contrast to the shoddy, ragged dress of the bulk of the civilian population. Its immediate neighbors credit Chile with a strong Prussian temperament, and it, in turn, sends officers to train the troops of its more distant neighbors. Those who should know maintain that it is only the army that saves the oligarchy in power from the revolutions that are frequently on the point of breaking out, but of which the outside world seldom hears. Chile has no conscription for her navy, and for the first time outside my own land I found placards picturing the ideal life recruiting officers would have us believe is led on warships. As the Chilean on his narrow strip of beach is almost English in his feeling for the sea, there seems to be no great difficulty in manning the best, or at least the second best, navy in South America.

Chileans themselves frequently refer to the prevalence of thieving among their national characteristics, and explain it by saying that the Araucanian Indians, who make up the basis of the population, had communal ownership and still have little conception of the line between mine and thine. Half the nation is by its own official admission of illegitimate birth. In various parts of Santiago there are doors fitted with a turno, known among the English-speaking residents as a “bastard barrel,” softly upholstered, into which a baby may be dropped, the turno given a half turn and a bell beside it rung, when nuns or their agents on the inside take charge of the mite without asking questions. Thousands of “orphans,” whose parents are still running about town, are housed by charity, and long troops of them may be seen any fine day taking an airing in the streets. This condition is by no means entirely the fault of the roto class. None but the civil marriage is now legal in Chile, whether by priest, minister, missionary, or rabbi; but the poor man must take a day or more off and disentangle much red tape to get married, only to be informed by his priest that in the eyes of the church he is not married at all, until he produces a handful of pesos to have the union religiously sanctioned. As throughout Latin-America, he is apt to conclude that the ceremony is a mere waste of time and money.

Small as is the foreign population of Chile, the church is largely in the hands of foreigners, so that “a Chilean cannot be born or married or die without the permission of a Spanish, Italian, or French priest.” German monks and nuns are also numerous, yet Chileans are not admitted to most of the monasteries and convents. The foreign priest not only makes the native pay high for his confessions and other formalities, but frequently refuses him a pass through purgatory unless he leaves the church a large legacy to cover his unquestionably numerous sins. Though this property is ostensibly used to aid Chile with schools and the like, even devout Chileans assert that their foreign priests send most of the proceeds to the “Capital of the Christian World.” Complaints against these conditions are legion, but the Chilean, like most Latin-Americans, is more noted for criticism than for effective action.

Though Santiago rises late, and usually takes a siesta from twelve until two, it retires early. Being the social and fashionable, as well as the political, center of the republic, it has, of course, its elaborate “functions,” and it is still near enough to the colonial days to retain the weekly plaza promenade. On gala occasions this is worth seeing. Santiago is one of the countless cities which claim to have the most beautiful women in the world, and some of the claimants to this distinction are comely even under their deluges of rice powder. Chilean women of the better class, with their pale, oval faces and their velvety black eyes, have a vague sort of melancholy in their manner, as if they were thinking of the great world on the other side of the tropics, or at least over the wall of the Andes. But evening entertainments are scarce and poor in Santiago, and by ten at night the streets are commonly deserted, except by the stolid pacos wrapped in their heavy black uniforms, and all doors are closed save those of a few cafés that drag on until midnight. Half a dozen cinemas unroll their nightly rubbish, usually fantastic and volcanic dramas from Italian film houses, woven around the eternal triangle; now and then a zarzuela company succeeds in making a passable season of it. The favorite zarzuelas are such gems as “La Señora no Quiere Comer Sola” (Madam does not wish to eat alone), or “No Hagas Llorar á Mamá” (Do not make Mama weep), the surest way to avoid which would seem to be to keep her away from the histrionic efforts of the Chilean capital. Yet the élite of Santiago attend these mishaps in considerable force and fancy garb, including overcoats or wraps in the unheated buildings, all laboring under the delusion that they are being entertained. There is opera for a month or two in the winter; on rare occasions a really good dramatic company, rather Italian than Spanish, makes a brief stay—and generally loses money, since, as a Chilean novelist puts it, “the artistic taste of our public is better suited to the slap-stick of short plays or the immaturity of some circus of wild animals.” But the audiences which these entertainments turn out toward midnight quickly fade away and leave the streets to solitude.

Among the poorer classes the zamacueca, the native dance of Chile, popularly called a “’cueca,” is a principal diversion. A man and woman, each waving a large gay handkerchief, move back and forth, as if alternately repelling and inciting each other, to the tune of a harp and a guitar and the clapping of many hands, while a big pitcher of chicha de manzana or de uva, which roughly correspond to our cider and grape-juice respectively, passes from mouth to mouth. The better-dressed class has certain simple pastimes in which both sexes join, though not often and never without an awe-inspiring display of chaperons on the side lines. There is, for instance, the “whistling game.” A man in competition with several of his spatted fellows runs four hundred meters, stops in front of a lady and whistles a tune, the name of which she hands him on a slip of paper, the first one to finish the tune without error and to return to the starting-point, being adjudged the winner. On the whole, the Spanish spoken by this class of Chileans is better than that heard in the Argentine, though there are many “chilenismos,” expressions peculiar to the country. Chile usually gives the “ll” its full sound, rather than reducing it to a poor “j,” but the “s” is largely suppressed. In spelling the country has certain rules of its own, the most noticeable being the use of “j” in many places where Spaniards use “g,” a legacy left by the Venezuelan, Andrés Bello, first president of the University of Chile.

I had looked forward with some interest to that far-famed feature of Santiago, her female street-car conductors. Familiar as they have since become, Chilean women led the world in this particular, the custom dating back to the war with Peru, a long generation ago. The street-cars of Chile are of two stories. Most of them are operated by a woman and a boy, about half the force being female and few of the rest grown to man’s estate. The boy is the conductor, which in Spanish means the motorman, and the woman cobrador, or collector. Far from inspiring the protection of wealthy rakes or causing enamored youths to squander their income riding back and forth in the car presided over by some unrelenting Dulcinea, however, most of the latter excite such repugnance that the more squeamish prefer to suffer a slight financial loss to accepting change from their unsoaped hands. On the back platform of the dingy electric double-deckers usually stands as un-entrancing a member of the fair sex as could be found by long search, her dismal appearance enhanced by the mournful, raven-black costume she wears. She is sure to be part Indian, her coarse hair tied in an ugly knob at the back of her head, high on top of which sits a hat of polished black, with a long pin stuck through it to add to the perils of life. In short, Chile’s female conductors are not giddy young girls, but stolid women of the working-class, very intent on their duties and only rarely whiling away an odd moment in harmless gossip with the youthful motorman of the car behind. Some romancer has written that the beautiful members of the clan are quickly recruited to more romantic service. Perhaps they are, for they certainly are not on the cars.

Street-car fares are absurdly cheap in Chile, so cheap, in fact, that the service cannot but be poor and dirty. Inside the cars riders pay ten centavos; up on the impériale they pay five, which at the commonly prevailing rate of exchange is less than two and one cents respectively. Not the least amusing thing about Santiago is the street-car caste, or the line of demarcation between the upstairs and downstairs riders. The white-collar, non-laboring class will stand packed like cordwood in the closed car rather than go up on the impériale, which is not only preferable in every way but cheaper. It is this latter detail that makes the upper story forbidden ground for the gente decente. As a Chilean-born business man of English parents, educated in London and widely traveled, put it in criticizing my “bad habit” of riding on top:

“I would much rather ride up there, too; it is airy, cleaner than inside, you can see the sights, and the weather is generally fine in Santiago. But if I did, my friends would look up from the sidewalk, nudge one another, and say, ‘Hullo, by Jove! There’s Johnny Edwards up there with the rotos. What’s the matter; can’t he afford a penny to ride inside? I’d better collect that little debt he owes me before he goes bankrupt,’—and within a day or two my creditors would be down upon me in droves.”

The Chilean peso is a mere rag of paper, originally engraved in New York and more nearly resembling our own bills than those of most South American countries. Theoretically worth a French franc, it is as doubtful of value as legibility, being unredeemable either in gold or silver and waking up each morning to find itself different from the day before. On the face of the few bills that still have visible words runs the statement, “The government of Chile recognizes this as a peso fuerte,” which is by no means the same thing as promising to pay a “strong peso” to the holder upon demand. The congress of Chile has decreed that the peso shall be worth ten English pence; but there is nothing quite so incorrigible in disobeying the laws of a country as its national currency, particularly one in which it is the custom, when in need of money, to go to a printing office instead of to a bank. No wonder there is no national lottery in Chile; playing the exchange is gambling enough to suit anyone.

With the exception of a few private, narrow-gauge lines in the nitrate and coal fields, the railroads of Chile are government owned. A state line now runs the length of the country, connecting its southernmost port on the mainland with its most northern province, and even with the capital of Bolivia. In the fertile, well-inhabited southern half of the country the railroads, like the more important ones of the Argentine, have the broad Spanish gauge, and down to where the population begins to thin out the trains are long and frequent. The “Longitudinal,” running for hundreds of miles northward from the latitude of the transandino through dreary deserts a bare meter wide, carries neither through passengers nor freight. The former would probably die of monotony or thirst on the way; the latter would be valuable indeed after paying the breath-taking freight rates. It is far quicker, more pleasant, and cheaper to take, or to send by, the steamers along the coast, and the real raison d’être of the “Longitudinal” is Chile’s determination to keep the two provinces she took from Peru.

On the whole, the railroads of Chile are a sad commentary on government ownership. There are probably more employees to the mile on Chilean railroads than on any other system in the world, not because the Chilean is a particularly poor workman, but because politicians foist upon the helpless public carriers so many needy but influential constituents. Yet both roadbeds and rolling stock of this overmanned system are astonishingly descuidado,—uncared for, dust-covered, unwashed, loose, broken, out of order, inadequate, with whole train-loads of perishable goods rotting in transit, and frequent wrecks. It is common rumor that the government pays twice the market price for all railway supplies, thanks to the carelessness and the grafting tendencies of the personnel, while every year finds the railroads with a million or more deficit. How carelessly the trains are operated is suggested, too, by the extraordinary prevalence of missing legs in Chile. It seemed as if one could scarcely look out a train window without seeing someone crutching along beside the track, to say nothing of those entirely legless, as if the railroad habitually ran amuck among the population.

Started by Meiggs, the fleeing Californian who carried the locomotive to the highlands of Peru, and continued by a deserter from an American sailing ship, the Chilean railroads were built chiefly by American capital, as well as by American engineers. They still bear many reminders of that origin. The passenger-trains have comfortable American day coaches, made in St. Louis; the sleeping-cars are real Pullmans; even the freight-cars closely resemble our own. The engines, though supplied with bells, are more often of British or German origin, or from the government shops near Valparaiso. There are three classes, or, more exactly, five, for the prices and service on the express trains are different from the corresponding ones on the mixtos. Except that in the former one is more certain of having an entire seat to oneself, there is little difference between first and second class. Fares are comparatively low even in these; on the lengthwise wooden benches of third class they are cheaper than hoboing. Trunks, however, pay almost as high as their weight in passenger, there being no free-baggage allowance. The assertion is frequently heard in Chile that third class is a disadvantage to the country, because the low price makes it too easy for the roto masses to move about. A rule that might not be amiss in our own land is that the engineer who jerks a train either in coming into or leaving a station is subject to a fine, if not to dismissal—but of course the Brotherhood would never permit any such interference with their long-established privileges. The trainboy nuisance, here known as a cantinero, with the accent on the beer, is in full evidence. Though the night trains carry Pullmans, there are no diners, because concessions have been given at various stations to men of political influence to run dining-rooms and the trains must stop there long enough to contribute the customary rake-off. The monopolists are less given to brigandage than they might be, however, and of late there has been inaugurated a system of sealed lunches at three pesos, including a half-bottle of wine. Moreover, it is a rare station that does not have a crowd of female food-vendors, especially well-stocked with fruit in the autumn season.

The eight o’clock express from Santiago sets one down in Valparaiso, one hundred and twenty miles away, at noon. From the Mapocho station the train climbs out of the central valley of Chile, squirming its way through many tunnels and over mountain torrents, with frequent magnificent views of the rich, flat plain which gradually spreads out hundreds of feet below. Then the valley narrowed and we came to Llaillai, the junction of the line up to Los Andes and over into the Argentine. Curving around the higher mountains, the other branch coasts leisurely downward, passing here a long vineyard, there pastures bordered by rows of Lombardy poplars and dotted with cattle, now a great estate belonging to a man living in Paris, the stone mansion of his administrator near at hand, the mountains forming the background of every vista. At Calera the “Longitudinal” sets out into the arid north, the fertile part of Chile quickly coming to an end in this direction and turning into the dreary desert which is at present the country’s chief source of wealth and fame. Then all at once the Pacific I had seen but once since entering South America two years before burst out in full ocean-blue expanse, without even an island to break up the unprotected bay in which the winds often raise havoc. Below Viña del Mar, Chile’s most fashionable watering-place, the precipitous hills come down so close to the sea that there is barely room for the highway, railroad, and tram line to squeeze their way past into the commercial metropolis and second city of the country.

Valparaiso, the greatest port not only of Chile but of the West Coast of South America, is the “Vale of Paradise” only comparatively. Built in layers or strata up the steep sides of the barren, shale coast-hills, it stretches for miles along the amphitheater of low mountains that surround a large semicircular bay, behind which one can see jumbled masses of houses sprawling away over the many ridges until these have climbed out of sight. There is so little shore at Valparaiso that there is room in most places only for two or three narrow streets following the curve of the bay, and for only one the entire length of the town, under the edge of the cliffs, much of it occupied by the dingy, two-story, female-“conducted” street-cars. In the central part of town a small space of flat ground has been filled in across one of the scallops of the bay, and on this made land are cramped the principal business houses and the central Plaza Arturo Prat. It is here that the earthquakes do their most appalling damage. The rest of the city climbs steeply up the shale hills overhanging the business section, in a jumble of buildings which give the town its only picturesque and unique feature. To get “top side,” where the majority of the Vale of Paradise dwellers live, there are escalators, or, more properly, “lifts,” since the majority of the largest foreign colony on the West Coast are English. That is, every little way along the cliff are two cars at opposite ends of a cable, which climb the slopes at precarious angles, though they are level inside, in about two minutes at a cost of ten centavos. For those who lack the requisite two cents, and for cautious persons who will not risk their lives on the escalators, several stairway streets rise in zigzag above row after row of sheet-iron roofs to the upper stories of the town. During this ascent the whole city spreads out below, all the panorama of Valparaiso and its semicircular bay, the latter speckled with hundreds of steamers, “wind-jammers,” and small craft, each far enough from the others to be ready to dash unhampered into the safety of the open sea when the wild southwest gales sweep in upon them. The Chileans formed some time ago the courageous project of having an English company protect this great open roadstead with a huge breakwater; but thousands of mammoth concrete blocks have so far been dropped into the seemingly bottomless harbor, leaving no visible trace, and now there are floated out hollow concrete structures of 150-foot dimensions. Once on top there are other street-cars, and more climbing to do, if one wishes to go anywhere in particular, though nothing as steep as the face of the cliff itself. Here may be seen Viña del Mar, a broad expanse of the Pacific, the aërial best residences of Valparaiso, and a picturesque tangle of poorer houses stringing away up the backs of the many verdureless ridges into the arid, uninhabited country.

The earth, like the sea, casts up on its beaches much human driftwood. Valparaiso is no exception to this rule, and here may be found wanderers, beachcombers, and roustabouts of all nationalities. Primitive landing facilities give its rascally boatmen the whip-hand over arriving or departing travelers. Many languages are spoken, English not the least important among them. Along the docks the roto stevedore works barefoot and bare-legged even in the winter season; over all the town rests a pall of aggressive, rather conscienceless commerce which offsets its scenic beauties. The Chilean is not a particularly pleasant fellow at best; down at his principal seaport he is even below the average in this respect. Impudent and grasping, unpleasantly blasé from his contact with the lower strata of the outside world—but all this one forgets in watching the red sun sink into the Pacific from the impériale of a street-car winding close along the edge of the sea, or when the lights of the town, piled into the lower sky, fade away as the traveler turns inland and climbs back up into the Andes.

From the squalid Alameda Station of Santiago another express sped southward through rows of those slender Lombardy poplars that are a feature of any landscape of lower Chile. The broad central valley, distinct from the arid northern section and growing more and more fertile from the capital southward, with ever more frequent streams pouring down from the range on the east to add to its productiveness, stretches almost floor-flat for more than five hundred miles to where the narrow country breaks up into islands. In this autumn season vineyards and cornfields stood sear and shriveled. The slightly rolling country had an indistinct brown tint under a gray, yet illuminated sky, the valley reaching from the all but invisible Pacific hills to the jagged, snow-capped Andean wall, like an irregular dull-white line painted along the canvas of the sky some little distance above the horizon. San Bernardo, a summer colony, was now a large cluster of closed houses surrounded by brown vineyards touched here and there with a deep red, as of poison ivy. A few bushy trees, some still green, the rest yellow, were half-visible on the left; now and then an evergreen grove broke the prevailing color with the verdant emerald of firs, shading away through all the tints of green to late-autumn saffron, a hazy world spreading away on either hand and rising beyond to the Cordillera lying dim-white under a new fall of snow.

Paralleling the railroad were good highways, sometimes with high banks, more often lined with hedges, which added a suggestion of England to the general atmosphere of California in November. Along these roads were many ox-carts, the drivers walking ahead and punching back over their shoulders at the animals with sharp goads. There was color in the ponchos, often in the other clothing of the lower classes here, especially among the huasos, as the gaucho is known in Chile, and this color seemed to be in exact ratio to the Indian blood, not of the individual, but of a given locality. Dust was everywhere. We passed numerous large corrals bearing the sign “Ferias Rejionales,” some with cattle in them, all surrounded by an elevated promenade from which prospective buyers could examine the stock. Horses and cattle shipped north in freight trains all had pasted on their rumps a paper bearing their destination. Towns were frequent and sometimes large, and there was much freight as well as passenger traffic, no doubt because Chile is like Egypt in that there is but one route up and down the country, here following the elevated central valley between the Andes and the sea.

At every station of any size groups of women and girls offered for sale fruit, bread, sweetmeats, and the like. They were particularly well stocked with grapes; native apples were plentiful, Chile being the only land in South America which grows them; not a few sold the pretty red copihüe, the national flower of Chile, a long bell-shaped blossom growing on a climbing plant of deep roots. The movements of these women were lively and vivacious compared with those of the higher Andes of more northern west-coast countries. Each wore a white dressing-gown over many layers of dark clothes, and most of them were decorated with earrings or necklaces of the red-and-black beans called guayruros with which I had grown familiar in tropical Bolivia. These berries are supposed to bring luck, or at least a man, and the Chilean woman of the ignorant class will sell her only possession for a few of them. Apple and cherry orchards flanked the track here and there, many of them bordered by blackberry hedges stripped now of their fruit. Rather drab farmhouses, hung with withered rose vines, alternated with curiously un-American wheat or straw stacks. Gradually cultivation and villages decreased, and an Arizona-like country wormed its way into the plain in arid patches. Here grapes were still offered for sale, but one might easily have mistaken them for raisins.

We passed several branch lines leading off toward the Pacific, and a few shorter ones climbing a little way up the flanks of the Andes. I dropped off at the fourth of these junctions, in Talca, a large town with far too many churches and the concomitant squalor, poverty, and ignorance. The plaster was beginning to peel off in places from the adobe façade of the big, ostensibly cut-stone building facing the central plaza. Here, as in all Chile, one was struck again by society’s waste of its resources,—robust men in the prime of life scurrying about with baskets of fruit or newspapers for sale, much potential energy frittering away its time for want of occupation. “Los Boi Escouts” of Talca were announcing a benefit performance that evening, but as this did not promise sufficient interest to make up for spending a night in so dismal a place, I went on to the considerable town of Chillan. Here it had been raining and the unpaved streets were full of miniature ponds through which I picked my way to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a bed—and not much of a bed at that.

In stories I had heard Chile was noted for its low prices. If ever it had that particular charm it has now disappeared, at least for the traveler. The hard little apples sold at the stations cost as much as good ones in New York; diminutive loaves of bread were nearly as high as a whole loaf at home. Establishments masquerading under the name of “hotels” are plentiful: if there were one-fourth as many clean, honest, and well conducted it would be a decided improvement. To pay an average of twenty pesos a day in the squalor of most Chilean hotels would be mishap enough; the doctoring to which one’s bill is invariably subjected makes the experience all the more painful. Though the daily rate purports to cover all service, morning coffee and rolls are always charged for as an extra. So also is fruit, at twenty times what it sells for in the market around the corner. Baths, which are so slow in being prepared as to wear out the patience of most foreign guests, cost several pesos each time they are ordered, whether they are taken or not. The crowning trick is to make out the bill by separate items, if one has had the audacity to ask for the daily rate in advance, thus doubling it; or, if one protests against this system, the next one is to contend that the day begins at a certain fixed hour, which is always on the opposite side of the clock from that at which the traveler arrives, and that the first and last meal each constitute a full day, with the result that the man who is continually traveling pays for sixty days a month in hotels even though he spends some half of his time on trains.

It was wet and sloppy and all the world was drowned in a dense fog when I set off again at dawn. Everyone who owned them wore heavy overcoats and neck-scarfs, keeping even their noses covered. One would have fancied a demand that trains be heated would be in order in such a climate, but if the lack of artificial heat is at times unpleasant it is healthful, and the traveler in South America is likely to return with a prejudice against it. At San Rosendo I caught a branch line along the shining Bio-Bio, the largest river of Chile, and followed it northwestward to the coast, the sun at last breaking through and suddenly flooding all the scene as the train took to rounding many rolling hills covered with scrub growth. The huaso was everywhere busy with his fall plowing, his ox-drawn wooden implement as primitive as those of Peru, except for its iron point. Here there was considerable eucalyptus, the foster child of the Andean tree world, though the poplar was more in evidence and the weeping willow frequent.

I spent a day in Concepción, third city of Chile, a brisk and mildly pretty town scattered over a hillside, center of a large grain district with coal fields near, hence the site of many factories, flour-mills, even sugar refineries, which import their crude product from Peru. Though it is the scene of considerable modern industry, and has the usual two-story, be-skirted tramcars, brilliant ponchos and gaunt oxen dragging clumsy, creaking carts are to be seen in its main streets. A splendid view of the town may be had from the Cerro Caracol, crowning point of a long ridge of rolling hills of reddish soil, yet covered with grass, so rare in South America, and much of it with a thick fir forest. A “snail” roadway winds upward, and immediately at the climber’s feet spreads out the entire city, flat and low for the most part, with the plethora of bulking churches common to all Chilean towns. There are many Germans in Concepción, south of which they grow ever more numerous. Along the Avenue Pedro de Valdivia, squeezed between the river and the hills in the outskirts, live scores of men of this nationality who came out less than half a century ago as simple clerks and who now have sumptuous mansions and large estates—quintas they are called in Chile—a single row of them eighteen blocks long on this one avenue boasting such names as “Thuringia” and “Die Lorelei” and the top-heavy architecture which goes with them. In Arauco province, a bit to the south, with a private railroad running into Concepción, are some of the few coal mines in South America, Chile being virtually the only country on that continent not entirely dependent on Newcastle or Australia for this sinew of industry. It seems to be a soft surface coal, mainly productive of smoke, great clouds of which frequently wipe out the beauties of the landscape in this vicinity.

Talcahuano, six miles farther northwest, is on Concepción Bay, national naval rendezvous and the best harbor in Chile, being seven miles across and bottled up by the island Quiriquina. The town, thrown around the inner bay like a wrap about a throat, with pretty residential hills climbing up close behind the modest central plaza, the outskirts scattered far and wide over a rolling, verdant country, has considerable shipping, but the Pacific is seen from it only through the rifts of islands and promontories. Forty years ago American whalers often entered this harbor, and some of the wealthy families of the vicinity to-day are descended from the deserting sailors they left behind.

In Talcahuano I found an American consul who had been there for decades, evidently long since forgotten by the authorities at home. Of the many tales he had to tell the most picturesque were those of his early days as a guano digger on the west coast, but he was more filled with the alleged rascality of the Germans in Chile. There were in Concepción, he asserted, forty German business houses as against four English and no American—or perhaps I should say “North American,” for the Chilean grows more enraged than any of his neighbors at our assumption of a term to which he considers himself equally entitled. The consul was greatly grieved to see the Germans steadily taking away the little trade Americans once had, driving out even our stoves and agricultural machinery from what had formerly been a United States stronghold. But the Germans were more apt to make things to fit local tastes, or the customer seldom had any fixed notion of what he wanted and fell easy prey to the clever and unscrupulous German salesman. The consul had recently discovered a German house secretly sending to the Fatherland a binder and a reaper which it had imported from New York, evidently because direct importation would have called official attention to the plan of copying the machines for the South American trade. He had recently bought what purported to be a reputable implement made in the United States and known by the trademark “Eureka.” It worked badly, however, and the parts broke so easily, that he finally examined it more closely and found that it was really a “Hureka,” made in Germany. Though Americans and English are hard to assimilate, clannish, little inclined to take Chilean wives, the Germans marry freely with the natives and gain much commercial and political advantage from such alliances. The Chilean-born children of Germans are legally Chileans, but at heart, according to the consul, they are still Germans. The Teutons have driven the natives out of all important business, except in the case of wealthy landowners, and these usually live in Paris and intrust their holdings to a German or other foreign manager. Our forsaken representative was also highly incensed at “the nonsense of American business men running down to South America in droves, making themselves laughing-stocks among the natives by their geographical ignorance, their manners and public drinking, and only stirring up the Germans to greater underground efforts.”

Though all Chile below Santiago is noted for its agriculture, its fertility increases with every degree southward. South Chile, which may be reckoned as beginning at the Bio-Bio River, where the vineyards end, is an almost virgin land, only a fraction of which is as yet under the plow. The Bio-Bio marks the point below which the Spaniards were never able to make a permanent conquest, for the region below it was the home of the most valiant Indians of South America, a race much more like our own untamable red-skins than the slinking tribes farther to the north. The river was finally agreed upon as the southern limits of Spain’s authority, and such it remained until that had wholly disappeared from the American continent. After the independence of Chile the republican government confirmed the valiant Mapuches, as the Araucanians call themselves, in their claim to regard the Bio-Bio as a frontier. It was not until forty years ago, when at last the white man’s fire-water had done what the Spaniards were never able to do, that the Araucanians were at last pushed back into limited reservations and Araucania formally taken under the rule of Santiago. The land was divided up among white settlers, and when the Indians objected the central government “sent out soldiers to shoot down the rebels, following just the same policy as you did in the United States,” as a Chilean told me in a naïve, matter-of-fact way.

The “first-class” coach in which I crossed the Bio-Bio, not so long before a proud product of St. Louis, was a rattling old wreck, the floor so sloppy and wet one needed rubbers, its window panes either broken or missing entirely, some of them pasted over with paper, the seats more worn and dirty than those on a backwoods branch line in the United States. As the weather had grown steadily colder from Talca southward, everyone on board was wrapped and overcoated beyond recognition. We moved slowly through a woodless, brown, rolling country almost invisible for the rain. In the early afternoon the train crept cautiously across a bridge far up above a small but powerful stream, amid green hills of plump, indistinct outline. The reason for the caution soon appeared. Just north of the city of Victoria we were suddenly routed out into a cold rain flung against us by a roaring wind like the spray from an angry sea, and found ourselves at the edge of a mighty chasm. At the bottom, in and about the stream which raged through it far below, lay the wreckage of a freight train that had dropped with the bridge a month before, killing the crew. Across this chasm swung a narrow, wire-suspended foot-bridge a furlong in length, which swayed drunkenly back and forth as the stream of wet and shivering passengers, a few women and aged, infirm men among them, crept fearfully across it, followed by all the boys and ragamuffins of the vicinity carrying the hand baggage—no white-collar Chilean of course, would carry his own even in case of wreck. We were bedraggled indeed when we climbed out of the mud and rain into another train, and another good hour was lost in transferring the mails and the heavier, fare-paying baggage before we were off again.

I found Temuco, up to the present generation the capital of the land from which the sturdy Araucanians were at length dispossessed, the most interesting town in Chile. It was more nearly like the cities of the Andean highlands, with something Mexican about it also, thanks to its mixture of dirt, poverty, and the “picturesqueness” of which the tourist rants. The Mapuche Indians are thick-set, the women especially so, broad-faced, with a reddish tinge showing through a light copper skin, due perhaps to the colder climate of their temperate homeland. Some of the women were comfortably fat; they wore their coarse hair in two braids, a band of colored cloth or silver coins about their round heads, this sometimes securing a gay head-kerchief flying in the wind. The mantos about their shoulders were usually a dull red, their skirts a true “hobble,” being a simple strip of cloth wrapped tightly around the waist and tucked in, with the raw edge down one leg. Their feet were bare, chubby, and by no means clean, though more nearly so than those of the typical Andean Indian. The children ran about bare-legged for all the wintry air. The older Indians of both sexes had rather dissipated features, as if the white man’s fire-water were still doing its work among them. The men wore a mildly gay short poncho, some still home-woven, most of them made in Germany, flannel drawers, a black or near-black skirt brought together between the legs, shapeless felt hats, and black leather boots of light material. The more poverty-stricken wore a rude moccasin and any head-gear available, even the cast off stiff straw hats of the summer-time futres of Temuco; and May is not the month for straw hats in southern Chile. The nearest Indian settlement is but half an hour’s ride from Temuco, and some of the Indian women rode into town on horses decorated with as many trappings and large silver ornaments as themselves; others carried baskets on their backs, with the leather band supporting it drawn tightly across chest or forehead. Babies were not carried on the mothers’ backs, that custom having disappeared where I turned eastward from the Andes across tropical Bolivia.

The modern Araucanian’s land is secured to him, and an official of the Chilean Government, known as “Protector of the Indians,” sees to it that the acreage he owns to-day is not alienated. But the tribe is dying, like all Indians in contact with European civilization, and the time is not many generations distant when the rest of his land will go to the white man. To all appearances the Araucanian has lost most of the warlike courage for which his ancestors were famous, though he has by no means degenerated to the cringing creature one finds in Quito or Cuzco. As in those cities, shopkeepers are obliged to learn the tongue of their most numerous customers, and Araucanian was heard on every hand, among whites as well as Indians. Some of the latter could speak nothing else, though now and then a familiar Spanish word broke out of the jumble of sound. The Mapuches had some of the superstition of the Quichuas and Aymarás toward the “little magic box with one eye,” and for the first time in months I was forced to resort to simple trickery to catch my chosen pictures.

Rain was almost incessant in Temuco, and the mud so deep that the better-to-do used suecos, wooden clogs on which were nailed imitation patent-leather uppers in any of the little shops devoted to that industry. The next most familiar sight was that of oxen pulling solid wooden wheeled wagons, straining laboriously through the sloughs called streets until one fancied the animals, with the yoke across their brows all day, must end each night with a raging headache.

Below Temuco the train crossed several considerable rivers. Long stretches of stumps and scattered wooden shacks suggested the days of Lincoln and Daniel Boone. Much rough lumber was piled at the flooded stations, which served ugly frontier hamlets tucked away among rolling hills once thick wooded and still so in places. Curiously enough this more southern section of Chile is an older country, in the settler’s sense, than that about Temuco. Seventy years ago, long before it was able to force the stronghold of the central valley of Araucania, the Chilean Government made an entry far to the south, catching the Indians in the rear and settling with foreign immigrants wide areas of what are now the provinces of Valdivia and Llanquihüe. The town of Valdivia and several other strategic points, chiefly on the coast, where the Spaniards had erected forts and established small precarious settlements, were moribund when Santiago turned its attention to the region in the middle of the last century. The coming of European colonists has given the district new life and considerable prosperity.

The methods of Chile in settling this wilderness of the south were simple. An agent in Germany sought colonists; an agent in Chile was sent to Valdivia to receive them when they landed. The first-comers were placed on the Isla de la Teja, where they would be secure against possible attack by the Indians on the mainland. There are still a number of German factories on that island, the inevitable brewery among them. When the colonial agent was forced to look farther to the unknown south for more land, he found nothing but matted forest. A trusted renegade Indian named Pichi-Juan was given thirty pesos fuertes (in those days nearly fifteen dollars) to burn this primeval woodland. Smoke clouds, visible from Valdivia, rose for three months, and at the end of that time a strip forty-five miles long and fifteen wide, from Chan-Chan to the Andes, was ready for the colonists.

All the way to Valdivia the product of the saw was in evidence,—rivers of planks, seas of squared logs. New little towns, built entirely of wood, and visibly growing, dotted the line of the railroad; in small clearings, about shacks as rough as those of our Tennessee mountains, the soil that had been turned up was rich black loam; the scattered inhabitants had the hardy, self-sufficient, hopeful air of all frontiersmen. Then great damp forests, strangely like those of the far north, grew almost continuous on either hand. I stood for half the afternoon on the back platform of our wreck of a first-class car, watching the cold, wet world race away into the north, and the temperate zone night, so different from that of the tropics, settle slowly down.

In the darkness we came to a little station called Valdivia, but it was merely the landing-place for the small steamer to the town of that name, which lay twelve miles up the river. It is named for Pedro de Valdivia, a companion of Pizarro in Peru and afterward conqueror of Chile—with reservations; for he had no such luck against the Araucanians as against the docile Quichuas farther north and finally lost his life in his efforts to subdue them. But Valdivia is Spanish only in name; in nearly all else it is extremely Germanic, so different from the typical South American town that one seems suddenly transported to another continent. Well built, two stories high, new and clean, without a suggestion of luxury, yet comfortable as a town of the north temperate zone, it might easily have been mistaken for one in the newer sections of Washington or Oregon. Most remarkable of all, at least to a man who had been traveling for years in lands of adobe, brick, or stone, it was made entirely of wood.

Saw-mill whistles awoke me at dawn. The sun, after a long struggle with the dense clouds rising from the unseen sea not far to the west, won the day, and every living thing was visibly grateful for its benign countenance, for continual rain is the customary lot of this part of Chile at this season. For once the weather was fine—except underfoot. The streets and roads of Valdivia were literally impassable, with the exception of those that were laid with plank floors, planks which would have been worth almost their weight in silver in most of the continent. Heavy rains bring thick forests, however, and here wood served every possible purpose. Wooden fences were everywhere, wooden sidewalks drummed under my heels with an almost forgotten sound; houses were covered with a rough species of clapboarding; even the few buildings that seemed at a distance to be of stone turned out to be made of wood tinned over, the roofs covered with lumber rather than shingles, either because Valdivia does not know how to make the latter or because boards are cheaper than labor. The unfloored streets were incredible sloughs of mud. One was named the Calle Intrépido, and the man would have been intrepid indeed who ventured out into it. A few aged hacks, smeared with mud to their wooden roofs, plied along the few principal streets between the Germanized plaza and the rather wide river which the town faces. To enter almost any shop was to be suddenly transported to the little towns of the Harz or the Black Forest, though the shopkeeper was likely to address a stranger in Spanish, usually with more or less foreign accent.

Isolated for a considerable period after their first arrival in southern Chile, the Germans began to move northward as the Chileans moved south, and the hostile Indians were squeezed between them. With the advent of the railroad, which reached Temuco a short generation ago and Valdivia some time later, the Chileanizing of the immigrants and the territory advanced rapidly, and even before the World War direct relations between these settlers of Teutonic blood and the Fatherland seem to have been rare. Yet the harsh German speech echoes everywhere through the trains and hotels of South Chile to-day, though the German-Chilean speaks Spanish as well as he does the tongue of his grandfather colonist, exercises all the rights of Chilean citizenship, and frequently marries into Chilean families. His ways are somewhat enigmatical, sometimes ludicrous, to the Latin-sired native, however, and for all his industry, he is to a certain degree the butt of the older society. What we know as an “Irish bull” is called in Chile a cuento alemán—a “German yarn.”

Below Valdivia lies a great potato-growing country, occupying the site of the burned forest, now a rich, rolling agricultural section. Blackberries were thick along the railroad. The centers of this uncouth, wood-built, prosperous region are the large German towns of La Unión and Osorno, towns in which German was the language of the schools and almost all the local officials bore Teutonic names. From Temuco southward the railroad had been running out like a dying stream, with ever decreasing traffic. I left Osorno by the daily freight, which dragged behind it one passenger car with two long upholstered seats along its sides serving also as a caboose and densely packed with well-dressed men entirely European in origin. Several young men were plainly of German parentage, yet they spoke Castilian together, and one such pair was wondering how they could escape the year of compulsory military service in Chile, “since our fathers came out here largely to avoid such slavery.” Rail fences, rude cabins in rough little clearings, rolling hills scratched over with wooden plows, countrymen in ever thicker ponchos and with but rare traces of Indian blood, burned woods covered with charred stumps and grazing cattle, lined the way on this journey. The railroad, here only a few months old, faded to a little grass-grown track. Then the land opened out, flattening away to the edge of Lake Llanquihüe, and I came to the end of railroading and mainland in Chile.

Puerto Montt, more than a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, and capital of the province of Llanquihüe, below which Chile breaks up into islands terminating in Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, was founded by Germans in the middle of the last century. It is a quiet hamlet of three or four thousand inhabitants, built of planks or wooden bricks, in a style reminiscent of Switzerland or Westphalia, on the edge of an immense harbor which hopes some day to serve as a station of a partly overland route between Australia and Europe. The commerce of the region is almost wholly in German hands, there being but two Chilean merchants, while the native population is miserable and poverty-stricken. Barefooted women, ragged gamins, not a few beggars, are to be seen in the streets, and there are far too many shopkeepers in proportion to producers. Here, too, may be seen women on horseback, wearing heavy ponchos and wide brimmed felt hats which give them a suggestion of misplaced “cow girls.” A short steamer trip from the town lies the large island of Chiloé, said to be the original home of the potato and still producing it in great quantities. Many of the neat, well-managed farms of Chiloé are owned by Boers who refused to endure British rule after the South African War, though a majority of the Chilotes are of old Spanish stock with a considerable strain of Indian blood.

I had come more and more to regret that I had not reached this wet and shivering corner of the world in the brilliant summer-time of Christmas and New Year’s. The regret was all the keener because it was coupled with the necessity of altering long-laid plans and retracing my steps, always an abhorrence. From Puerto Montt I might in summer have crossed the two Chilean lakes of Llanquihüe and Esmeraldas, Laguna Fría in the Argentine, and finally famous Nahuel-Haupi, and, with ten days’ tramping across the pampas, have come back to Buenos Aires by Neuquen and the “Great Southern.” But at this season such a journey was impossible and, having no taste for polar explorations, I let Puerto Montt, in a latitude similar to that of Boston, stand as my “farthest south,” and turned tail and fled back into the warmer north.

At Temuco I wired ahead for a berth on the night train to Santiago. The precaution was hardly necessary. At the end of the train waiting in San Rosendo were two brand new cars stencilled “Pullman Company, Chicago,” which had not yet had time to go to rack and ruin. There were but few passengers in the first of them; in the second I found myself entirely alone. The conductor bowed low over my pass with, “Will you have a berth or a stateroom?” The porter was a ragged roto such as might have been picked up at any station, but he lost no time in making up my private parlor. Just how much the huge yearly deficit of the government railways of Chile is due to the hauling back and forth of empty first-class cars, and the ease with which general passes are granted, is of course a question for financiers rather than a random wanderer. Before I turned in, I impressed upon the melancholy porter the necessity of calling me in time to get off at Rancagua, station for a famous American copper mine up the mountainside to the eastward. He was vociferous in his advice to me to “lose care.”

Unfortunately I did so. By and by I was disturbed by a thumping on my door that finally brought me back to consciousness. I sprang up and—and heard the irresponsible half-Indian masquerading as porter say in a mellifluous voice:

“You wished to get off at Rancagua, señor? Well, you must hurry, for I overslept and we are just pulling out of there.” No doubt, being a Chilean roto, it had never occurred to him that his “gringo” charge had taken off his clothes to sleep. By the time I might have had them on again we were miles beyond, and I had gone back to bed. From Santiago I hurried back to the Argentine so fast that I paid in cash the breath-taking fare between my two railroad passes. I was just in time; for the very next train was forced to back down to Los Andes again, and the transandean pass remained snowed in until the following September.

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VI. HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY

One cold June evening, with more than a hundred days and eight hundred miles of travel in Chile and the Argentine behind me, I took final leave of Buenos Aires—not without regret, for all its ostentatious artificialities. Or it may be that my sorrow was at parting from the good friends with whom I had been wont to gather toward sunset in the café across from the consulate for a “cocktail San Martin,” one of whom now volunteered to see me as far as Montevideo just across the river—a hundred and twenty miles away. Out the Paseo de Colón the Dársena Sud was ablaze with the lights of the several competing steamers, equal to the best on our Great Lakes, which nightly cross the mouth of the Plata. For the two cities are closely related. In summer Porteños flee to Montevideo’s beaches; in winter the white lights of Buenos Aires attract many Uruguayans; the year round business men hurry back and forth. Aboard the Viena of the Mihanovich Line I watched the South American metropolis shrink to a thin row of lights strewn unbrokenly for many miles along the edge of the horizon, like illuminated needle-points where sea and sky had been sewed together. Wide and shallow, exposed here to all the raging winds from the south, the Paraná Guazú (“River like a Sea”) often shows itself worthy of its aboriginal name in this winter season. I did not wake, however, until the red sun was rising over Montevideo and her Cerro and we were gliding up to a capacious wharf.

It was fitting that my sight-seeing should begin with the little rocky hill surmounted by an old Spanish fortress which is the first and last landmark of the traveling Uruguayan. To the Cerro, barely five hundred feet high, yet standing conspicuously above all the rest of the surrounding world, Montevideo owes both its name and its situation. When the Portuguese navigator Magalhães, whom we call Magellan, sailed up what he hoped might prove a passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a sailor on lookout, catching sight of this little eminence, cried out, “Monte vid’ eu! I see a hill!” On it was built the first fort against the Charrúa Indians, and its value both as a place of refuge and as a stone quarry made it natural that the chief town of the region should have grown up about it. The part the Cerro has since played in Uruguayan history is out of all keeping with its insignificant size; the poems that have been written about it are as legion as the legends which hover over it. It holds chief place in the national coat-of-arms and in the hearts of homesick sons of Uruguay. Never in all the rebellions and revolutions since its discovery has the Cerro been taken by force of arms; never will the people of Montevideo tire of telling haughty Porteños that Buenos Aires has nothing like it.

From its summit all Montevideo may be seen in picturesque detail and far-spread entirety, the point where the Plata, deep brown to the last, for all its sea-like width, meets the Atlantic and flows away with it over the horizon, then, swinging round the circle, the faintly undulating plains, broken here and there by low purplish hillocks, of the “Purple Land.” It is a pity that the Cerro, certainly not impregnable as a fortress, has not been made a place of residence, or, better still, transformed into such a park as Santa Lucía of Santiago. The fashionable section of Montevideo, however, has moved in the other direction, leaving the famous hill, with its garrison-sheltering old Spanish fort and its lighthouse, to squatters’ shanties, rubbish heaps, and capering goats, not to mention the insistent odors of a neighboring saladero where cattle are reduced to salt beef.

In many ways the Uruguayan capital is the most attractive city of South America; as a place to live in, contrasted with a place in which to make a living, it is superior to many American cities. There is a peculiar quality of restfulness about it unknown to its large and excited rival across the Plata, something distinctive which easily makes up for the handicap of being so near a world metropolis as to be overshadowed by it. For another thing, it is nearer the mouth of the river, making it a true ocean port and the most nearly a seaside resort of any national capital in Spanish-America. Built on a series of rocky knolls, roughly suggesting the fingers of a rude hand, the charm of its location is enhanced by undulations that recall by contrast the deadly flatness of Buenos Aires. The old town, all that existed two generations ago, is crowded compactly together in true Spanish fashion on what might be called the forefinger, though it had unlimited space to spread landward. On this rocky peninsula the cross streets are narrow and fall into the sea at either end, for here it is but eight or ten short blocks from the Plata to the Atlantic. On one side is an improved harbor with steamers of many nationalities, on the other is a bay lined with splendid beaches. Like that of its great neighbor, the harbor of Montevideo requires frequent dredging, and its problem is quite the contrary of that in Valparaiso and other bottomless west-coast ports.

Along with its seascape, this situation gives the city a very exhilarating air, especially in the winter season. Then it is often penetratingly cold, and frequently so windy that not only the most securely fastened hat but the hair beneath it threatens to abandon the wearer. On the day of my landing a windstorm caused several deaths and much property damage. Among other things it took the sheet-iron roof off a building in which four fishermen had taken refuge and as these ran away the roof followed and fell upon them. In the third story of the frame hotel that housed me I often woke from a dream of being rocked in a ship at sea, and Punta Brava in a far corner of Montevideo’s suburbs was rightly named indeed on windy days. Fierce thunderstorms also marked my stay in the capital, some of them accompanied by the mightiest of flashes and crashes, during which water fell in such torrents that one could scarcely see across a narrow street—tropical storms they might have been called, had it not kept right on raining long after it had done raging.

Uruguay claims 1,400,000 inhabitants, of whom all but the million are said to live in the capital, though the lack of a definite census makes guessing a popular pastime. But the city is much larger in extent than this number would imply. One can ride for hours on the lines of its two excellent tramway companies without once leaving town. Even in the older sections Montevideo is substantially and handsomely built, with many good modern monuments. Only a few old landmarks are left, such as the purely Spanish cathedral on the Plaza de la Constitución, for Uruguay seems to consider her first demand for independence in 1808 the beginning of her history and makes no effort to preserve the memories of her colonial or pre-colombian days. For all that, the capital has retained a considerable atmosphere of old Spain, a distinctly seventeenth-century echo, along with her South American style of up-to-datedness. The best houses along the fine avenues are generally in colonial style, an almost Moorish one-story building, with lofty ceilings and space-devouring patios. Especially in the roomy suburbs do the dwellings stop abruptly at one story, so abruptly sometimes as to suggest that ruin, or at least a laborer’s strike, has suddenly befallen the owner. The real reason is probably because it would be hard to marry off one’s daughters if their “dragons” had to begin their wooing by shouting up to the second or third floor windows.

Iron-work grilles are universal, and many house-doors have brass-lined peepholes through which the resident can see whether the man knocking is worth admitting. Gardens with subtropical plants are numerous and promenades under palm-trees by no means unusual. Especially along the edge of the sea there are over-ornate quintas, alternating with washerwoman shanties; but there is little oppressive poverty in Montevideo, and at the same time little of the conspicuous plutocracy so familiar across the river, a lack of contrast which adds, perhaps, to the monotony of many a street vista. Poor ranchos are by no means rare in the farther outskirts, but these are open-air and almost clean slums compared with the congested sections of our own large cities. Out beyond the older town are park improvements on an extensive scale. The Prado, with its great Rose Gardens, said to include hundreds of varieties, though but few were in bloom among the dead leaves of June, is worth coming far to see. Here real hills break the monotony of the landward vista and make artificial, over-polished Palermo with its deadly flatness seem disagreeable by contrast. The tale goes that a group of wealthy Porteños once set on foot a movement to buy one of Uruguay’s hills, carry it across the river, and set it up in one of their own plazas. No doubt they could have reimbursed themselves by charging admission and rights of ascension, but like many ambitious Latin-American plans this one died prematurely.

In general Uruguayans are well-dressed, and comfortably well-to-do, if one may judge from appearances; compared with roto Chile the capital is immaculate. “Beachcombers” are rare in this only important port of the country and beggars are seldom seen, though there is a plague of petty vendors. It had been like landing on a hostile shore to make our way through the amazingly impudent mob of hoarse-voiced cabmen, newsboys, hotel touts, lottery-ticket vendors, vagrants, pickpockets, useless policemen, and idle citizens into the tranquil waters of a Sunday morning in the Uruguayan capital; but this common waterfront experience did not last long. There is something extremely pleasant about most of the modest, unpretentious Fluvenses, as the people of Montevideo call themselves, a term we might translate as “rivereens.” They have, as a rule, a natural politeness, a frank and open simplicity all but unknown across the river, a leisurely, contemplative philosophy that will not be broken down even by the material prosperity of a country that is making perhaps the most intelligent use of its situation and resources of all the republics of Latin-America. It is said that the Uruguayan came mainly from the Basque provinces and the Canary Islands, while the argentino is chiefly of southern Spanish origin; that the former brought with him and still retains a sturdier, less facile, but more dependable, more thoroughgoing character. Those of wide commercial experience in the continent say that the Uruguayan is the most honest man south of Panama; every foreign resident I questioned rated Uruguay as the most lovable country in South America—and as a rule foreign residents do not see the best side first. Personally, I found the Uruguayan more sincere, less selfish, somewhat more solid and at the same time more of an impulsive idealist than his materialistic neighbors across the Plata. His country is far enough south to escape the indolence of the tropics, far enough north to make life itself seem of equal importance with making a living. With every natural advantage of the Argentine, except the doubtful one of size, and a more frugal and industrious population not greatly modified by recent immigration, Uruguay is still peopled by a kind of colonial Spaniard, somewhat improved by the breezy, generous quality of his New World domain.

To those who approach it from the south, where they are almost unknown, negroes are noticeable in Montevideo and become more so as one proceeds northward through the country. No doubt they drift down from Brazil and, finding the wide Plata an obstacle, seldom reach its southern shores. Yet they are so few, and slavery is so slightly connected with them in the Uruguayan mind, that there is scarcely a “color-line.” The daughter of a former Uruguayan minister to Washington told me she had always informed inquiring Americans that there were no negroes in Uruguay, and had only discovered her error upon her return with a sharpened color sense. In Uruguay people are often called by nicknames of color, ample proof that there is no sensitiveness about the hue of the skin. These popular terms, usually preceded by the affectionate “Ché” of southeastern South America, run all the gamut of tints,—“Hola, Ché morocha.” “Diga, Ché trigueña!” “Cómo va, Ché negrito?” It is a common experience of visiting Anglo-Saxons to hear themselves addressed by familiar persons as “Ché rubio,” literally “red-head,” as a complimentary distinction from the universally black-haired natives. The latter, particularly the women, are almost always of plump form and comely face, whatever their color, with few of the cadaverous types so numerous in the north temperate zone. Uruguayan women, by the way, are perhaps a trifle more Moorish in their family life than those of Buenos Aires, but they are not wholly unaware of the “advanced” atmosphere of their environment.

Buenos Aires has long had the reputation of being the most expensive city on earth, probably because it is large enough to be famous, for certainly its neighbor Montevideo is still less of a poor man’s paradise. For one thing, the difference in basic coins favors the Uruguayan profiteer. Many things which cost an Argentine peso in Buenos Aires cost an Uruguayan peso, or two and a half times as much, in Montevideo. It is highly to the credit of Uruguay, and a constant source of pride to her citizens, that her dollar is the only one in the world normally worth more than our own; but it is painful for the visitor to be forced to purchase at so high a price pesos that will seldom buy what a quarter should. In hotel charges, public conveyances, laundries, lottery-tickets, and other necessities of life the Uruguayan dollar seems to go little farther than that of the Argentine, and certainly it has nothing like the purchasing power of our own. Not only are there substantial coins in circulation, instead of more or less ragged scraps of paper redeemable only in the imagination, or coins so debased that only a careless speaker would refer to them as silver, but any gold coin is legal tender in Uruguay. Throw down an English sovereign in the smallest shop in the most isolated corner of the republic and it is instantly accepted at a fixed value. An American $10 gold piece passed without argument as $9.66 Uruguayan, though our dollar bill was rated at only ninety centésimos before the war. I chanced to be in a pulpería far out in the interior of Uruguay when the shopkeeper asked the large estate owner of the vicinity to take a hundred pesos to the capital for him. By and by the pulpero returned from a back room with a small handful of gold and a bit of paper on which he had figured out the sum he wished to send. He handed the estanciero several English sovereigns, some German 20-mark pieces, a Brazilian gold coin, an American half-eagle, two French napoleons, and the rest of the sum in Uruguayan paper, silver, and nickel. There was no argument whatever as to the “exchange” on the foreign coins; each had its fixed value anywhere in Uruguay. It was something like what a universal coinage will be when the world grows honest and intelligent enough to establish one—though of course our bankers would not allow any such system to become universal, even did the perversity of human nature make it possible. This ready exchange, and the possibility of turning Uruguayan paper into gold upon demand, are among the reasons which make the Uruguayan dollar normally the most valuable in the world.

Down on one of its beaches the city of Montevideo runs a sumptuous hotel and an official Monte Carlo. Here it brings ambassadors and “distinguished visitors” for afternoon tea or formal banquets, gives balls, keeps an immense staff of liveried menials at public expense the year round, and during the season takes money away from the wealthy “sports” from across the river with an efficiency not exceeded anywhere along the Riviera. More than one passing observer has found this an excellent means of taxing the rich for the benefit of the poor, since the profits of the Casino go into the municipal treasury. As much can scarcely be said for the lottery run by the federal government, with its incessant appeal to the gambling instincts of all classes of the population. The tickets assert that “the lottery is run for the Hospital de Caridad and its profits are destined for exclusively beneficent ends,” but the statement rings as hollow as many similar attempts on the part of Latin-America to coax itself to believe that there is something good in an essentially vicious institution.

Music and drama flourish during the winter in Montevideo; uncounted cinemas perpetrate their piffle in and out of season. An excellent Italian dramatic company, headed by the emotional actress Lyda Borelli, sometimes, and probably not unjustly, called the successor of Duse, was playing at the “Solis” during my visit—and bringing out in pitiless contrast the insufferable barnstormers usually seen on the South American stage. The opera season is in August, when that half of stars and troupe who do not cross to Santiago de Chile are on their way back from Buenos Aires to New York or Europe. Orchestra seats are then at least $12 each and boxes from $80 up, but as one must have a box for the season or be rated a social nonentity, there are sad rumors of Fluvense families scrimping all the rest of the year in order to buy their opera tickets. Naturally this makes them somewhat exacting and capable of giving an unpleasant reception to singers tired out at the end of a long season. Caruso himself has been roundly hissed in Montevideo. Plays and the opera begin at twenty-one o’clock. As in Italy and Brazil, and more recently in the Argentine, the law requires the use of the excellent twenty-four-hour system in all public buildings, and many a private timepiece has followed suit. The decree was new and throughout the city were many pasted-over signs such as:

Museum open from 12 to 16 o’clock.

Somewhere in South America I met a Dane who contended that a small country, like a man of modest wealth, is better off than a great nation. Uruguay bears out the statement. We have been accustomed to speak of the “A.B.C.” countries of South America as having the only stable and progressive governments in that continent. Only its slight size, as compared with its gigantic neighbors, has caused Uruguay to be overlooked in the formation of that list. As its near neighbor and relative, Paraguay, is perhaps at the bottom of the scale governmentally, so Uruguay, by its national spirit, its energetic character, and its advanced legislation is probably at the top, more nearly fulfilling the requirements of an independent state than any other nation south of the United States. Certainly it is superior to both Chile and Brazil in everything but size, and it is doubtful whether even the Argentine is governed with more intelligence and general honesty. Once as troublesome a state as any in Latin-America, Uruguay has settled down and developed her natural resources until she is noted for her financial stability, and revolutions are memories of earlier generations. Were she a large country, instead of being merely a choice morsel of land smaller than some counties of Texas, there is little doubt that she would stand at least as high as any of her neighbors—or would size, always an obstacle to good government in Latin-America, bring her down from her high level?

Uruguay has not always been a small country, nor for that matter a country at all. In the olden days the Banda Oriental, or “Eastern Bank,” of the River Uruguay was a province of the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires. To this day the official name of the country is “La República Oriental del Uruguay,” and the people still call themselves “Orientals.” In 1800 the whole “Eastern Bank” had but 40,000 inhabitants, of whom 15,000 lived in Montevideo. When Napoleon overran Spain and the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires revolted, the Banda Oriental remained loyal, thus opening the first breach between the two sections of the colony. Not long afterward the “grito de libertad” sounded in the interior of the province, and the man who was destined to become the national hero of Uruguay, the “First Oriental,” the “Protector of the Oriental Provinces,” soon took the head of the revolt.

José Gervasio Artigas was a mere estanciero of the “Eastern Bank” until he took up soldiering, some time before the “cry of liberty.” In 1811 he left the Spanish army and fled to Buenos Aires, but soon became an advocate of complete Uruguayan independence, a patriot or a traitor, according to the side of the Plata on which the speaker lives. Having won their freedom from Spain, the argentinos were finally defeated by the “Oriental” general, Rivera, and Artigas became ruler not only of the present Uruguay but of the now Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, Corrientes, Santa Fé, and Córdoba, these having formed the “Federal League” in opposition to the Buenos Aires Directory. To read Uruguayan school-books, “the Tucumán congress was secretly working to establish a monarchy on the Plata, and our five provinces sent no delegates.” One by one, however, the other provinces returned to the new mother country, only the “Eastern Bank” persisting in its isolation and demand for complete autonomy. Meanwhile Artigas was in exile—and at one time was offered a pension by the United States—but finally, in 1825, a band of “Orientals” besieged Montevideo and Uruguay declared her full independence.

The Uruguayan flag remains the same as that of the Argentine, with a golden sun superimposed. The revolutions of 1863 and 1870, each two years long, are the only serious disturbances that have occurred in the “República Oriental” since its independence, and with those exceptions the country has steadily advanced in health and prosperity. Its government is more centralized than our own, more like that of the Argentine, the congress being elected by popular vote in the departments, but the executives of the latter being appointed by the federal government. Argentinos speak of Uruguay with a kind of forced condescension, as of a member of the family temporarily estranged from the rest, or as a land of no great importance yet one worthy of again being a province of what they consider the greatest country on the globe, and they pretend at least to think that the great development of the Argentine will in time inevitably bring back to the fold this one lost lamb. But the “Orientals” consider their government superior and show no tendency to make the change.

Uruguay’s reputation as perhaps the most progressive republic in South America is largely based on her advanced legislation, most of it fathered by a recent president. Under his guidance stern minimum wage and maximum hour laws have been enacted, and many doctrines of the milder radicals have been put into modified practice. The legislators forbade bull-fights, cock-fights, and prize-fights in one breath. Uruguay is the only country in South America with a divorce law, and the church has been shorn of the militant power it still has in most of Spanish-America. Montevideo bids fair to become the Reno of the continent, as well as its only summer-resort capital. Dissatisfied husbands or wives move over from Buenos Aires; Spanish and Italian actors look forward to their Uruguayan engagement as an opportunity to air their conjugal grievances—though they are not “aired” in the American yellow-journal sense, for here divorce is strictly an affair between the parties concerned and the judge and lawyers, rarely being so much as mentioned even in the back pages of a provincial newspaper. Priests are comparatively rare sights in the Banda Oriental; religious festivals and public processions have been abolished, and the influence of the church on the government reduced to a minimum. Montevideo is the seat of an archbishop, but he exists only on paper, for the party in power is not friendly to the clergy and the papal appointment must be confirmed by congress. There are, to be sure, many crude superstitions left, especially among the poorer classes and in the rural districts, but they give Rome no such income as it derives from similar sources in the rest of the continent. Several Protestant churches have been built in Montevideo, and all faiths enjoy a freedom that would seem astounding on the West Coast. Indeed, comparative indifference to sect lines makes it an ordinary experience for Protestant ministers traveling in rural districts to be asked by persons professing themselves devout Catholics to baptize their children. “For one thing,” as one such rustic put it, “it is cheaper than when the priest does it.” It may seem a matter of slight importance to those who have never known the suffering inflicted by the infernal din of hand-beaten clappers against disguised kettles in the church towers of the Andes that on the evening of my first day in Uruguay real church bells, of a musical tone I had almost forgotten, were ringing in a way that must have been genuine music to the ocean-battered old windjammer just creeping into the harbor. Far off in the autumn twilight the sound was still carried softly to my ears by the wind before which gray clouds were scurrying like a battalion in broken ranks of defeat, toward the western sky, stained blood-red by the already dead sun.

Politically the Uruguayans are blancos or colorados, “whites” or “reds.” It is a splendid distinction. For one thing, the parties can print their arguments and their lists of candidates in posters of their own color and even the stranger has no difficulty in deciding which side is speaking. Townsmen can announce their political affiliation by wearing a red or a white cravat, or a bit of ribbon in their lapels; countrymen, by the color of their neckerchiefs. There is contrast enough between the two colors to obscure the lack of any other real difference between the two parties. In theory the “reds” are “advanced” and the “whites” more conservative. Evidently there are no neutrals in Uruguayan politics; everyone is either “red” or “white” from the cradle, not because Uruguayans take a greater interest in political matters than average republican societies, but because it is bad form, and lonesome, to be outside the ranks; and men who do not vote are fined. How an Uruguayan becomes attached to this or that party is a mystery; almost none of them can give any real reason for their affiliation. Evidently, like “Topsy,” they are “jes’ born” in their natural colors.

It is now fifteen years since the “reds” came to power on the heels of Uruguay’s last revolution. Possession is nine points, even in so progressive a corner of Latin-America, and the “whites” have been the “outs” from that day to this. Yet one often hears blancos speak of “when we start our new revolution,” for it seems to be taken for granted that the “whites” will come back some day with bullets, and virtually every man in the country is prepared to fight on short notice for one side or the other. Roughly speaking, “big business,” large estate owners, and the church, in other words the predatory classes, are “whites,” though neckcloths of that color are by no means rare on the peons and gauchos of the more backward country districts. The leader of the “reds,” now a private citizen merely because the constitution does not permit the same man to be president twice in succession, has often been described as “a mixture of idealist and predatory politician,” but he knows the secret of imposing his will upon the government and is generally credited with most of Uruguay’s progressive legislation. For all his efforts and many real results, however, there is still much that is rotten in the Republic of Uruguay. The most advanced laws are of doubtful use when they are administered by the bandits in office who still flourish throughout the rural districts. In contrast with the brave modern theories of government is the practice in such things as permitting scores of the lowest forms of brothels to flourish in the very heart of the capital. I cannot recall a more disgusting public sight in the western hemisphere than the long rows of female wrecks in scant attire who solicit at the doors of several streets radiating from the Anglican church, while veritable mobs of men and youths march back and forth to “look ’em over,” amid laughter, ribald witticisms, and worse.

Contrary to the usual custom in South America, there is no military conscription in Uruguay; recruits are enticed by posters covered with glowing promises. Yet for all the “advanced” principles of equality reputed to reign in the little republic, its army is largely made up of the poorer and more ignorant element of the population. It is not a dangerous military force, but it is very useful to the party in power not only in preserving law and order but for discouraging “white” revolutions. Whether or not only “reds” are recruited, or whether those placed on the government payroll automatically become “reds,” whether indeed youths in the political-ridden interior do not have redness thrust upon them, is a question not to be determined during a brief visit. As to the “national navy” of Uruguay, it consists, if my semi-official informant is trustworthy, of one gunboat, two cruisers, four steamers, and a transport, all of which, when they are not absent on one of the frequent “official missions” that make life in the Uruguayan navy just one festival after another, may be seen anchored in the harbor of Montevideo, their eyes turned rather toward the “whites” on shore than toward foreign foes.

I traveled fifteen hundred miles on the network of the Ferrocarril Central of Uruguay. This and the equally British “Midland” reach all towns of importance in the republic, though they still by no means cover it thoroughly. Railway travel in South America is seldom as luxurious as in the United States, but in the dwarf republic both cars and service are, on the whole, excellent; the trains are so much more comfortable than many of the towns through which they run that it is not strange that scores of the inhabitants come down to sit in them as long as they remain. There are few accidents, the trains are seldom late, though not particularly swift, and while fares are high there are frequent low-priced excursions, announced on handbills as in our own land. The English-made cars are on a modified American plan, some of the first-class coaches having leather-upholstered divans as large as beds, even second-class boasting little tables between the seats for those who care to lunch or play cards. Between the two classes at opposite ends of the train there is usually a compartment with kitchen stove and pantry that serves as a combination café and dining-car, a generous dinner costing a peso, wine, or “cork rights” from those who bring their liquor with them, extra. Sleeping-cars, journeying on both lines in order to find distance enough for an all-night trip, run from Montevideo to Paysandú and Salto, on the shores of the River Uruguay bounding on the west the republic of the “Eastern Bank.” Compared with Chile, railroading in Uruguay is palatial and immaculate, though even here the only heating arrangements for bitter June days are doormats between the seats, and the only really serious criticism to be made is against the bad habit, common throughout South America, of starting the trains at some unearthly hour in the morning.

I took the shortest line first and, rambling at moderate speed across a somewhat rolling country more fertile in appearance than the Argentine, brought up at Minas. A broad stone highway, here and there disintegrated by the heavy rains, led the mile or more from the station to the town, an overgrown village in a lap of low rocky hills monotonously like any other Uruguayan or Argentine town of its size, with a two-towered church and a few rows of one-story buildings toeing wide, bottomless streets. As in the Argentine, there are no cities in Uruguay that compare with the capital; the present department capitals were originally forts against the Indians and the Portuguese around which people gathered for protection, and few of them have cause to grow to importance.

The second journey carried me into the northwestern corner of the country. As far as Las Piedras, a suburban town twenty miles from the capital, there are a score of daily trains in either direction. Street-cars come here also, the place being noted for a granite monument topped by a golden winged Victory commemorating a battle for independence in 1811, from the terrace of which Montevideo’s fortress-crowned Cerro still stands conspicuously above all the rest of the visible world. Then this chief “Oriental” landmark disappears and to the comparative cosmopolitanism of the federal district succeeds the bucolic calm of the campaña, as the pampa is called in Uruguay. The absence of trees alone gives this a mournful aspect. The “Oriental” has tried half-heartedly to make up for the natural lack of woods by planting imported eucalyptus and poplar, at least about his country dwellings, but nowhere do these reach the dignity of a forest. Uruguay has less excuse for poor roads than the Argentine, for if it has as much rain and even heavier soil, it has an abundance of stone, rare in the land across the Plata. Yet though several stone highways leave the capital with the best of intentions, they soon degenerate into sloughs seldom navigable in the wet winter season. Most Uruguayan roads are merely strips of open campaña, the legal twenty-two meters wide, flanked by wire fences, or occasionally by cactus hedges. Estates a few miles off the railroads have no chance of getting produce to market during a large portion of the year; yet the prosperity of the country depends almost entirely on the exporting of foodstuffs.

Fertile rolling lomas, with now and then a solitary ombú spreading its arms to the wind on the summit, made up most of the landscape, a scene not greatly different from, yet infinitely more pleasing than, the dead flatness of Argentine pampas. The ombú is the national tree of Uruguay, of majestic size and always standing in striking isolation on the crest of a loma, because, according to the poet, it loves to overlook and laugh at the silly world, though the botanist explains that it is planted by birds dropping single seeds in their flight and reaches maturity only on hillocks out of reach of stagnant water. Beyond Mal Abrigo, rightly named “Bad Shelter,” granite rocks thrust themselves here and there through the soil; for long stretches coarse brown espartillo grass covered the country like a blanket. This and the abundant thistles often ruin the black loam underneath, but the average “Oriental” estanciero abhors agriculture, preferring to give his rather indolent attention to cattle and sheep, for he considers planting fit only for Indians, peons, and immigrant chacreros. Nor is the lot of these Basque, Spanish, or Italian small farmers always happy, even though they hold their plots of earth on fairly generous terms, for locusts have been known to destroy a year’s labor in a few hours. There were a few riding gang-plows, however, drawn by eight or ten oxen, and many primitive wooden plows behind a pair or two of them. Sleek cattle, and horses of better stock than the average in South America, grazed along the hollows and hillsides; now and then an ostrich of the pampas, occasionally a whole flock of them, legged it away across the rolling campaña. Though most of the country people lived in thatched huts made of the rich loam soil, sometimes laid together with a clapboard effect and oozing streaks of mud at this season, both sexes were well and cleanly dressed.

The railroad wound around every loma, refusing to take more than the slightest grades. Now and then we climbed ever so little up the flanks of such a knoll and discovered to vast depths of haze-blue horizon a plump, rolling country of purplish hue, dotted with dark little clumps of eucalyptus, from each of which peered a low farmhouse and occasionally a Cervantes windmill for the grinding of grain. There were many such estancia houses, yet they were all far apart in the immensity of the little Republic of the Eastern Bank. Why most stations were so far from the towns they served, in this level country, was a mystery. The towns themselves varied but slightly in appearance,—a scattered collection of one-story buildings, in most cases covered with a stucco that had at some time been painted or whitewashed, a pulpería, or general store, sacred chiefly to the dispensing of strong drink, and, radiating from it, wide roads plowed into knee-deep sloughs of black earth. A few sulkies and huge two-wheeled carts, an occasional country wagon with four immense wheels, from which produce was leisurely being loaded into freight-cars set aside by the local switch engine—to wit, a yoke of oxen—some real estate and auction signs offering the chance of a life-time, completed the background of the picture. In the foreground the inevitable gang of shouting, mud-bespattered hackmen was almost lost in the throng of wind-and-sun-browned men in bloomer-like trousers. Peons smoked their eternal cigarettes; gauchos shod in low alpargatas or high, soft, wrinkled leather boots, a white or a red kerchief floating about their necks, the short, stocky riding whip known as a rebenque hanging from a wrist, lounged about the door of the pulpería, to posts before which were tied trail-spattered horses saddled with several layers of sheepskins. An incredibly motley collection of dogs; a majestic policeman in full uniform and helmet above his voluminous bombachas, looking essentially peaceful for all the sword dangling at his side; a few men and youths, bare-legged to the knee, wading about with cheerful faces, as if the rainy season were at worst a temporary inconvenience more than offset by the long months of fine weather, added their picturesque bit to the gathering. Every movement and gesture showed these people to be of quicker intelligence than the dwellers in the high Andes. Few women were seen either on trains or at stations, except at the smaller towns, where there were sometimes groups of them, wholly white with few exceptions, but wearing earrings worthy the daughters of African chieftains. At each halt the station-master in his best clothes, looking busier and more important than a prime minister on coronation day, stood watch in hand, the bell-rope in the other, waiting for the time-table to catch up with us; the town notables looked on, half-anxiously, half-benignly, as if they considered themselves very indulgent in allowing the train to run through their bailiwick and felt deeply the responsibility involved; boys of assorted sizes, barefoot and shod, wormed their way in and out of the throng staring at everything with wondering eyes; a few comely girls sauntered about to see and be seen, and friends and relatives took the hundredth last embrace amid much chatter and mutual thumping of backs. Then all at once the station-master gives the bell three sharp taps, as much as to say, “I mean it, and I am not a man to be trifled with,” and as the train gets slowly under way some town hero grasps the opportunity to show his fearlessness by catching it on the fly, and dropping off again half a car-length beyond with a triumphant, sheepish grin on his sun-browned countenance.

Two days later the sun, rising huge and red over my left shoulder, painted a brilliant pink the rounded lomas flanking the Y-shaped line to Treinta y Tres (also written “33”) and to Melo, far to the northeast of Montevideo, then spread a pale crimson tint over all the gently rolling world. Fluffy lambs turned tail and fled as we approached, the watchdog, true to his calling even unto death, charging the train against all odds and putting it to ignominious flight. Here and there lay a whitening skeleton, the animal’s skull sometimes stuck up conspicuously on the top of a fence-post. There is no unsettled despoblado in Uruguay, no deserts or haunts of wild Indians, but there is still much land put to little or no use and not a few remains of the destruction wrought during the civil war that ended in 1852. Rare, indeed, is the standing structure in the rural districts that was not built since that time.

At a small station we were joined by a youth of twenty, pure Caucasian of race, of the class corresponding to our “hired man.” His long, wavy, jet-black, carefully oiled hair contrasted strangely with his complexion, very white under the tan; his eyes were light-brown, as was also the labial eyebrow he now and then affectionately stroked. He wore a raven black suit, the coat short and tight-fitting, the trousers, or bombachas, huge as grainsacks, disappearing in great folds into calfskin half-boots. A black felt hat of the squared shape once popular at our colleges was held in place by a narrow black ribbon tied coquettishly under his chin. The bit of his speckless shirt that could be seen was light green; above it was a rubber collar and a cream-colored cravat adorned with a “gold” scarfpin; on the third finger of his left hand he wore a plain gold band; about his neck floated a huge, snow-white, near-silk kerchief, and a foreign gold coin hung from the long gilded watch-chain looped ostentatiously all the way across his chest. About his waist he wore a leather belt six inches wide, with several buttoned pockets or compartments in which he kept money, tickets, tobacco, and other small possessions, and from the back of which, barely out of sight, hung his revolver. A poncho of faint pink-white, as specklessly clean as all the rest of his garments, and thrown with studied abandon over one shoulder, completed his outfit.

He rode first-class, and having produced his ticket with a millionaire gesture meant to overawe the modest guarda whose duty it was to gather it, he strode into the dining-car with great ostentation and called for a drink. With the same air of unbounded wealth he paid his reckoning, flung a generous tip to the waiter, who probably got more in a week than this at best low-salaried farm-hand in a month, and strutted back to his seat. It was evident that he was not traveling far, or he would have sneaked into the second-class coach in his old clothes. At each station he got off to parade haughtily up and down the platform, casting peacock glances at the dark-tinted criolla girls who embroidered it. I approached him at one such stop and asked permission to take his picture. He refused in very decided and startled terms. I felt that his “no” was not final, however, and scarcely a mile more lay behind us before he came wandering up with a companion and sat down beside me. Why did I want his picture? Would it cost anything? How many copies of it would I give him? Well, if it was true, as I claimed, that they could not be finished on the spot—and why not?—I could of course send them to him? Gradually he reached the opposite extreme of begging me to take his picture. His companion having suggested that it might be published “allá en Europa,” he kept his delight down to becoming gaucho dignity with difficulty, and before we descended to take the picture at the station where he left the train, after a short and evidently his only railway journey in months, he was assuring me that I might publish it “over there in Europe, in ‘Fray Mocho’ of Buenos Aires” (which the raucous-voiced trainboy incessantly offered for sale) “or anywhere else.” Only when the train had gone on without him did I discover that he was a blanco fleeing from arrest in his own department for the killing of a rural official in some political squabble, a fact that seemed to be common knowledge among my fellow-passengers and which must have made a bit startling my sudden request to photograph him.

The Cerro lighthouse was still flashing through the dense black night when, late in June, on the shortest day of the year, I took the tri-weekly train for Brazil. By the time the edge of darkness was tinted pink by a cloudless day which gradually spread upward from the horizon, we were already halting at country stations where thickly wrapped rustics who had driven miles in their bulky two-wheeled carts, a lantern set on either side of them in a sort of wooden niche raised aloft on a stick, were unloading battered cans of milk. Durazno, a good-sized department capital strewn over a low knoll and terminating in a church, was so flooded by the River Yi at its feet that its parks, alameda, and “futbol” field were completely under water and many poor ranchos stood immersed to their ears. The names of the stations were often suggestive,—Carda, Sarandí, Molles, all named for indigenous trees, so striking is one of them in this almost treeless landscape. From Rio Negro, another of the department capitals which pass in close succession on this line, the “Midland” railway paralleled our own for a dozen miles before striking off over the brown lomas toward Paysandú. Well on in the afternoon the smoothly rolling country broke up into the little rocky gorge of a small stream lined with bushy trees. It was probably not five hundred feet anywhere from the bottom of the brook to the top of the rock-faced hill, but this was such unusual scenery to “Orientals” that I had been hearing since hours before of the extraordinary beauty of this natural phenomenon, and all prepared to drink their fill of it from the windows of the train. It was named Valle Eden, but times seem to have changed in that ideal spot, for a policeman in mammoth bombachas stood on the station platform, and of Eve there was not so much as a fig-leaf to be seen.

I had ridden the sun clear around his short winter half-circle when I descended at Tacuarembó. The town had a hint of tropical ways,—women going languidly down to the little sandy river with bundles of clothing on their heads, the streets running out into grassy lanes scattered with carelessly built ranchos. Features, which had grown more and more Indian all day along the way and in the second-class coaches, here sometimes suggested more aboriginal than Caucasian blood. Here, too, there had been much rain, and the very bricks had sprouted green on the humid, unsunned south ends of the houses. The shortness of the days was emphasized by the discovery that I was back in candle-land again, where there was nothing to do in the evening but stroll the streets or go to bed.

I had been reading the Uruguayan epic “Tabaré” for hours next morning, and possessing my soul in such patience as one acquires in Latin-America, when I learned by chance that a mucamo, as they call a mozo in Uruguay, had been waiting in the hotel patio below and asking for me every few minutes since the night before, the servants having been too indolent to bring me word. With the better part of a day lost I rode away on a stout, gray-white horse of rocking-chair canter. The muddy or flooded road curved and turned and rose and fell, always seeking the moderate height of the succeeding ridges and here and there crossing gently rounded cuchillas. The mucamo on his piebald was outwardly a most unprepossessing creature, but he was a helpful, cheery fellow, in great contrast to the usual surly workman of southern South America, and though only sixteen and scarcely able to read, he was by no means dull-witted. Apparently there was not a bird, a flower, or an animal which he did not know intimately, and he was supernaturally quick in catching sight or sound of them. The hornero, a little brown bird that makes its ovenlike nest on fence-posts, the branches of trees, and the crosspieces of telegraph-poles, was there in force; the cotorra, a species of noisy paroqueet, was almost as numerous. The chingolo, resembling a sparrow, sits on the backs of grazing cattle and lives on the garrapatas, or ticks, that burrow into the animal’s hide. The bien-te-veo (“I spy you”), a yellow bird with a whistling call suggesting that of a happy child playing hide-and-seek, frequently glided past; the startled cry of the teru-teru rose as we advanced, disturbing it. The latter is called the “sentinel bird” and is so certain to give warning of anything approaching that even soldiers have found it a useful ally. Dark-gray with white wings and a slight crest, it resembles a lapwing with a cry not unlike that of our “killdeer.” The bien-te-veo and the teru-teru live in perfect immunity because of a local superstition similar to the one sailors have for the albatross. The woodpecker of Uruguay is called carpintero, because he works in wood; the viuda (widow), a little white bird with a black head, is so called, my companion explained to me in all innocence, because she produces her brood regularly each year without ever being seen with a male. A little dark-brown bird called the barranquero builds nests like the homes of our ancient cliff-dwellers, in the sides of barrancas, or sand-banks. Among the many small birds, songsters, screamers, and disciples of silence, which eddied about us, one of the most conspicuous was the cardenal, gray with white under the wings, its whole head covered with a bright-red liberty cap. A large bird resembling the stork my companion called “Juan Grande”; others call it the chajá, because of the jeering half-laugh it is always uttering. It lives on the edges of swamps, though it cannot swim. A big brown carancho, a hawk-like bird living on carrion, circled above us with the ordinary South American scavenger buzzard, here called simply cuervo, or crow. There is good shooting of a local partridge in Uruguay, the open season being from April to September. At plowing time the gulls come in great numbers to feast on the fat grubs. The dainty crested Uruguayan sparrow has all but been driven out by the English variety, introduced, if the local legend can be believed, by an immigrant who let a cageful of them fly rather than pay duty on them.

Thus we rode hour after hour over the rolling lomas and cuchillas. The ground was here and there speckled with macachines, daisy-like little flowers of a wild plant that produces a species of tiny sweet potato. The mucamo had never heard of the Castilian tongue; what he spoke was the “lingua oriental.” It was, to be sure, by no means pure Spanish, but a Spaniard would have had no difficulty in understanding him.

At the door of an estancia house with all the comforts reasonably to be expected in so isolated a location I was met by “Pirirín,” son of a former minister to London and Washington, and brother of a well-known Uruguayan writer. His English was as fluent as my own, with just a trace of something to show that it was not his native tongue. An old woman at once brought us mate, and we sucked alternately at the protruding tube each time she refilled the gourd with hot water. The sun soon set across the rich loam country, which was here and there being turned up by plodding oxen, and threw into relief the three cerros chatos, flat-topped hills that give the region its nickname and which suggest that the level of the country was once much higher before it was washed away into the sea by heavy rains that even now gave earth and sky such striking colors.

The wealth and prosperity of the native estanciero of Uruguay is rarely indicated by the size or dignity of his estancia house. As in the Argentine and Chile, many estates are owned by men living in the capital, if not in Europe, each in charge of a gerente, or overseer-manager. Small as Uruguay is—by South American standards it seems tiny, even though it is almost as large as New England—many of its estancias are immense, especially in these northern departments. There has been much chatter by politicians about limiting the size of estates and setting up immigrants in the place of absentee owners, but so far it has chiefly ended in political chatter. The average Uruguayan estancia house is not particularly well adapted to the climate, at least during the winter months. A little clump of poplars or eucalyptus, occasionally a solitary ombú, invariably marks the site of the main dwelling. Not a few men of comparative wealth pig it out on their own immense estates, scorning modern improvements, cut off by impassable roads from markets and all the outside world several months a year, refusing to subscribe to the rural telephone, depending for their news on private postmen hired by groups of their fellows. A few estate owners, especially those who have lived abroad, demand moderate comfort, whether for themselves or their managers, though even “Pirirín” was content with more primitive conditions than many a small American farmer would endure.

It is quickly evident and freely admitted that the average estancia in Uruguay is loose of morals. Estancieros frankly state that it is better if the cook is old and unattractive. It seems to be the rule rather than the exception, for estancia washerwomen and others of their class to present the estate with a score of children by members of the owning family and perhaps by several of the peons as well. Among this class marriage is unpopular and generally considered superfluous. There is much noise about Uruguay’s “advanced” theories of social improvement, yet the law forces, and costumbre expects, no help from the father in the support of his illegitimate children. If he chooses to acknowledge them and aid in their up-bringing, he is credited with an unusually charitable disposition. The woman, on her side, takes her condition as a matter of course. She will admit with perfect equanimity that she is not certain just who is father of this child or that and pointing out one of a half dozen playing about the estancia backyard she will say laughingly, yet with a hint of seriousness and pride, “Ah, sí, el tiene papá;” that is, he is one of her children whose father has recognized him. Yet these women are as punctilious in general courtesy and the outward forms of behavior as their proud patrón or the hidalgo-mannered peons.

Next day “Pirirín” and I rode away in the Sunday morning sunshine across the immense estate, the teru-terus screaming a warning ahead of us wherever we went. In and about a bañado, a swamp full of razor-edged wild grass that cut the fingers at the slightest touch, we saw specimens of the three principal indigenous animals of Uruguay,—the carpincho, nutria, and mulita. The first, large as an Irish terrier, is grayish-brown in color, with an unattractive face sloping back from nose to ears, squirrel-like teeth, and legs suggestive of the kangaroo. Amphibious and sometimes called the river hog, he looks like a cross between a pig and a rabbit, or as if he had wished to be a deer but had found the undertaking so difficult that he had given it up and taken to the water and to rooting instead. On the edges of Uruguayan streams there are many happy little families of the beaver-like nutria, an aquatic animal large as a cat, with long thick fur and a rat-like tail. Playful as a young rabbit, the nutria is quick of hearing and swift of action, taking to the water at once when disturbed and leaving only its nostrils above the surface; yet when cornered it is savage, as many a dog has learned to his sorrow. When the pulperos, or country shopkeepers, of Uruguay found that nutria skins brought a high price from the furriers of Europe and the United States they set the countrymen to killing them off regardless of age, sex, or season, ruining many of the skins by their clumsy handling and all but exterminating the species. The mulita, also called tatu, is a timid, helpless little animal of the iguana family, half-lizard, half-turtle, with a scaly, shield-like covering that suggests medieval armor, and which, dug out of its hole and roasted over a fagot-fire, furnishes a repast fit for kings.

The flora was also striking, for all the absence of forests and large growths. The sina-sina is a small tree with dozens of trunks growing from the same root, willow-like leaves, and large thorns that clutch and tear at anything that ventures within reach of it. A waterside bush called the curupí contains a poison that the Charrúa Indians formerly used for tipping their arrows. The sarandí, a bush growing on the banks of streams with its feet always in the water; the madreselva, or honeysuckle; the chilca, a thinly scattered bush scarcely two feet high, and the guayacán, a bushy plant with beautiful white flowers in season, were the most common landscape decorations. Thousands of macachines covered the ground, white flowers with now and then a touch of yellow or velvety dark-red.

The gauchos of the estate had been ordered to rodear, to round up a large herd of cattle, and soon we came upon them riding round and round several hundred on the crest of a hillock. On the backs of some of the animals chingolos still sat serenely picking away at the garrapatas or the flesh left bare by them. The latter are the chief pest of an otherwise almost perfect ranching country, for thousands of these aggressive ticks burrow into the hide of the animals and suck their blood so incessantly that great numbers of cattle die of anemia or fever. All but the more backward estates now have a big trough-like bath through which the cattle are driven several times a year as a protection against garrapatas, but even so it is one peon’s sole duty to ride over the estate each day to curear, or skin the animals that have died, carry the skin home, and stake it out in the sun to dry.

More than two hours of riding brought us to the almacén or pulpería, the general store that is to be found on or near every large estancia in Uruguay. As the day was Sunday scores of gauchos with that half-bashful, laconic, yet self-reliant air common to their class, ranging all the way from half-Indian to pure white in race, with here and there the African features bequeathed by some Brazilian who had wandered over the nearby border, silently rode up on their shaggy ponies one after another out of the treeless immensity and, throwing the reins of the animal over a fence-post beside many others drowsing in the sun, stalked noiselessly into the dense shade of the acacia and eucalyptus trees about the pulpería, then into the store itself. Most of them were in full regalia of recado, pellones, shapeless felt hat, shaggy whiskers and poncho. With few exceptions the “Oriental” gaucho still clings to bombachas or chiripá, the ballooning folds of which disappear in moccasin-like alpargatas, or into the wrinkled calfskin boots still called botas de potro, though the custom that gave them their name has long since become too expensive to be continued. These “colt boots” were formerly obtained by killing a colt, unless one could be found already dead, removing the skin from two legs without cutting it open, thrusting the gaucho foot into it, and letting it shape itself to its new wearer. A short leather whip hanging from his leather-brown wrist, a poncho with a long fringe, immense spurs so cruel that the ready wit of the pampa has dubbed them “nazarinas,” a gay waistcoat, and last of all a flowing neckcloth, the last word of dandyism in “camp” life, complete his personal wardrobe. It is against the law to carry arms in Uruguay, yet every gaucho or peon has his cuchillo in his belt, or carries a revolver if he considers himself above the knife stage. Every horseman, too, must have his recado, that complication of gear so astonishing to the foreigner, so efficient in use, with which the rural South American loads down his mount. An ox-hide covers the horse from withers to crupper, to keep his sweat from the rider’s gear; a saddle similar to that used on pack animals, high-peaked fore and aft, is set astride this, and both hide and saddle are cinched to the horse by a strong girth fastened by thongs passed through a ringbolt. On the bridle, saddle, and whip is brightly shining silver, over the saddle-quilts and blankets are piled one above the other, the top cover being a saddlecloth of decorated black sheepskin or a hairy pellón of soft, cool, tough leather, and outside all this is passed a very broad girth of fine tough webbing to hold it in place. With his recado and poncho the experienced gaucho has bedding, coverings, sun-awning, shelter from the heaviest rain, and all the protection needed to keep him safe and sound on his pampa wanderings.

As they entered the pulpería the newcomers greeted every fellow-gaucho, though some two score were already gathered, with that limp handshake peculiar to the rural districts of South America, rarely speaking more than two or three words, and these so low as to be barely audible, apparently because of the presence of “Pirirín” and myself. The rules of caste were amazing in a country supposed to be far advanced in democracy. Though the gaucho, in common with most of the human family, considers himself the equal, if not the superior, of any man on earth, he retains many of the manners of colonial days. “Pirirín” and I, as lords of the visible universe and representatives of the wealth and knowledge of the great outside world, had entered the pulpería by the family door and were given the choicest seats—on the best American oil-boxes available—behind the counter. The sophisticated-rustic pulpero greeted us each with a handshake, somewhat weak, to be sure, because that is the only way his class ever shakes hands, but raising his hat each time, while we did not so much as touch ours. To have done so would have been to lower both the pulpero’s and the by-standing gauchos’ opinion of us. Then he turned and greeted his gaucho customers with an air nicely balanced between the friendly and the superior, offering each of them a finger end, they raising their hats and he not so much as touching his.

Yet these slender, wiry countrymen, carrying themselves like self-reliant freemen, with a natural ease of bearing and a courtesy in which simplicity and punctilio are nicely blended, take the stranger entirely on his merits and give and expect the same courtesy as the wealthy estanciero. If the newcomer shows a friendly spirit, his title soon advances from “Señor”—or “Mister,” in honor of his foreign origin, be he French, Spanish, Italian, English, or American—to the use of his first name, and he will be known as “Don Carlos,” “Don Enrique,” or whatever it may be, to the end of his stay. Later, if he is well liked, he may even be addressed as “Ché,” that curious term of familiarity and affection universally used among friends in Uruguay. It is not a Spanish word, but seems to have been borrowed from the Guaraní tongue, in which it means “mine,” and probably by extension “my friend.” To be called “Ché” by the Uruguayan gaucho is proof of being accepted as a full and friendly equal.

In theory the pulpero establishes himself out on the campaña only to sell tobacco, mate, strong drink, and tinned goods from abroad; in practice these country storekeepers have other and far more important sources of income. They are usurers, speculators in land and stock, above all exploiters of the gaucho’s gambling instinct. Thanks perhaps to the greater or less amount of Spanish blood in his veins he will accept a wager on anything, be it only on the weather, on a child’s toys, on which way a cow will run, on how far away a bird will alight, or on whether sol ó número (“sun or number,” corresponding to our “heads or tails”) will fall uppermost at the flipping of a coin. This makes him easy prey to the pulpero, who is usually a Spaniard, Basque, Italian, or “Turk,” and an unconscionable rogue without any other ideal than the amassing of a fortune, yet who somehow grows rich at the expense of the peons and gauchos, instead of meeting the violent death from the quick-tempered hijo del país who despises yet fears him.

The gauchos were originally called “gauderios,” that is, lazy, good-for-nothing rascals. To-day that word is an exaggeration, for they have a certain merit of industry and simple honesty. There is considerable vendetta among them, gambling rows and love affairs especially, much of which goes unpunished, particularly if the perpetrator is a “red” and his victim a “white.” Punishment for fence-cutting or sheep-stealing is surer: as in our own West in earlier days the loss of a man is largely his own affair, while the loss of a flock of sheep or a drove of cattle is serious. To make matters worse, the country comisarios, or policemen, are often subsidized by certain estancieros to the disadvantage of others, and the juez de paz is quite likely to be a rogue, in either of which cases the friends of “justice” usually get off and their enemies get punished.

According to “Pirirín,” the average gaucho is an incorrigible wanderer. Paid but ten or fifteen pesos a month “and found,” and satisfied with quarters which most workmen in civilized lands would refuse with scorn, he is given to capricious changes of abode and is likely to throw a leg over his faithful horse at the least provocation. Among these incurable pampa wanderers there are not a few “poor whites,” often with considerable Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins, its origin lost in their Spanicized names. Hospitality is the first of the virtues of the estanciero, and any genial horseback tramp who turns up may remain on the estancia unmolested for a day, a week, or a month, as the spirit moves him. There was a suggestion of our own cowboys among the group that finally overflowed the pulpería, though the gauchos were less given to noisy horseplay and had far more dignity and courtesy. Some of them could read without having to spell out the words, and while “Orientals” in the mass are not a nation of readers and there is considerable illiteracy, these countrymen were much more in touch with the world’s affairs than the same class in the countries of the West Coast.

The gaucho may still occasionally be heard thrumming a guitar and wailing his sad, Moorish, genuinely Oriental songs, invariably sentimental and deeply melancholy, with never a comic touch, like a lineal descendant of the wandering troubadour of the Middle Ages or the street-singers of the Mohammedan East. When he is not making music or love, he is sucking mate and talking horses. He has more than a score of words for his equine companion, running through every gamut of color, behavior, and pace. His obsession for this topic of conversation is natural, for he has an instinctive horror of going on foot and the horse is to the resident of the pampas what the ship is to the sailor; without it he is hopelessly stranded. Yet his interest is entirely of a utilitarian nature. He is racially incapable of any such affection for his mount as causes other races to spare it unnecessary suffering; if he coddles it at all it is merely for the selfish motive of his own safety or convenience. Among the picturesque types of the campaña and the pampa is the domador, the professional horse-breaker. His customary fee is five pesos a head, “with living,” and his methods are true to his Spanish blood. Instead of being broken early, the colts are allowed to run wild until they are four or five years old; then a drove of them is rounded up in a corral and the victims suddenly lassooed one by one and thrown to the ground. With half a dozen peons pulling on the rope about his neck until he is all but strangled, his legs are tied and a halter is put on and attached to a tree, where the animal is left to strain until he is exhausted, often hurting himself more or less permanently. Then his tongue and lower jaw are fastened in a painful noose that forces him to follow the peon, who rides away, jerking at the rope. Finally, when the weary and frightened animal is trembling in every limb, the brave domador mounts him and, with a horseman on either side to protect him, and pulling savagely at the colt’s sore mouth, the potro is galloped until he is completely worn out. It used to be beneath gaucho dignity to ride a mare, and to this day no self-respecting domador of the old school will consent to tame one. Sometimes the female of the species draws carts, with her colt running alongside, but on the larger estancias she is allowed to roam at large all her days.

In the evening, with the gauchos departed and the pulpería officially closed to the public, we added our bonfire to the sixteen others in honor of St. Peter and St. Paul, which we could count around the horizon, and gathered about the table with the pulpero’s family to play “lottery,” a two-cent gambling card game. It was long after midnight when “Pirirín” shook off the combined fascination of this and the pulpero’s amenable daughter. From my cot behind the pulpería counter I saw the day dawn rosy red, but clouds and a south wind promised rain before my companion roused himself. We got into an araña (spider), a two-wheeled cart which did somewhat resemble that web-weaving insect, and rocked and bumped away across the untracked campaña behind two half-wild young horses. Never was there a let-up from howling at and lashing the reeking animals all the rest of the morning, an English education not having cured “Pirirín” of the thoughtless cruelty bequeathed by his Spanish blood. Through gullies in which we were showered with mud, up and down hill at top speed we raced, until the trembling horses were so weary that we were forced to hitch on in front of them the one the mucamo was riding. In Tacuarembó this owner, or at least prospective owner, of thousands of acres and cattle went to the cheapest hotel and slept on an ancient and broken cot in the same room with two rough and dirty plowmen, while I caught the evening train for the Brazilian border.

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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.

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