complete reconstruction of both abbey and church was absolutely essential for the development of their educational and other work; and I found them all studying and discussing ornate and elaborate plans by a well-known Bavarian architect, who had "let himself go" in a west front apparently in English Elizabethan style (recalling Hatfield), and a Byzantine church with Perpendicular Gothic details and two lofty towers.[6] The process of demolition, commencing with the choir of the old church, was started a few weeks after I reached S. Paulo; and I remember that we were nearly asphyxiated by the falling and crumbling walls, which (as I have said) were built of a kind of adobe or dried mud, and broke into thick clouds of blinding yellow dust as they tumbled about our ears. The rebuilding of the Benedictine Abbey was only {161} one feature, and not the most considerable, of the architectural transformation which was taking place before one's eyes in every part of S. Paulo, and was developing it from an insignificant provincial capital into one of the largest and most progressive cities of South America. In twenty years the population had increased tenfold--from fifty thousand to nearly half a million--and two facts struck me as both remarkable and encouraging, namely that the birth-rate was more than double the death-rate, and was (so I was told) more than double that of London--nearly thirty-six per thousand. The State and city of S. Paulo were alike cosmopolitan, 300,000 immigrants (more than half of them Italians) having entered the country in the year before my arrival, and more than half the population being of foreign birth. The vast majority of the day-labourers in the city were Italians, on the whole an industrious and thrifty race (though not without obvious faults), who assimilated themselves without difficulty to the country of their adoption. The rapidly growing prosperity of S. Paulo was shown by the astonishing appreciation in a few years of the value of land in and around the city--exceeding, so I was assured by a prominent American, any phenomenon of the kind in the United States. Our Abbot had, not long before my arrival, acquired with wise prescience a fine country estate in the eastern outskirts, which was already worth at least ten times what he had expended on its purchase. The _chacara_ (as such properties are called) included a fine old house of Imperial days, garden, farm, orchard, extensive woods, as well as a lake, football fields, playgrounds and a rifle-range; and here our young pupils spent {162} one day every week enjoying the open-air life and sports unattainable in the city.