I soon fell into the routine of our Brazilian monastic day, which differed a good deal (especially as to the hours for meals) from our European time-tables. {164} Coffee betimes; breakfast ("almoço") before noon; dinner at half-past five, after vespers, suited the school hours, and the busy life of the community. We anticipated matins at seven p.m.; hurried to the refectory for a dish of scalding tea (smothered in sugar, no milk), or a glass of lemonade, then hastened back to choir for night prayers and sundry pious exercises. This final collation (if it may be so called) was really alarming: the scorching tea was gulped down with a reckless rapidity which reminded one of Quilp tossing off the hissing rum in his riverside arbour! and I used to return to choir positively perspiring. But our commissariat was on the whole good, if simple; we had no such privations to face as in old days at Olinda, and as far as I was concerned the kind abbot was always on the alert to see that I wanted for nothing. Our chacara supplied us with farm produce of the best; and great platters of green and purple grapes, from the same source, were at this season served up at every meal. The abbot, on his first free day, drove me round the interesting city. We visited a fine girls' school, conducted by Augustinian canonesses; the superior was sister to an Anglo-Irish Benedictine, and another nun was a Macpherson, with an accent of that ilk. We saw, also, two institutions founded by the Abbot, St. Adalbert's Parochial schools, under nuns of St. Catherine, and a hospital managed by sisters of the same Order. The hospital stood at the end of the Avenida Paulista, a noble boulevard lined with handsome houses of every imaginable style of architecture--Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish, Swiss, Venetian, classical, rococo, each one in its own glowing and luxuriant garden. This, naturally, was the rich {165} man's quarter; the working people had of course their own dwellings, chiefly in the populous industrial district of Braz. But I saw no slums in S. Paulo, and nowhere the depressing contrast between ostentatious luxury and poverty-stricken squalor which is the blot on so many European cities. In S. Paulo there was, in fact, no poverty:[8] there was work and employment and food for all; and it is true to say there was no need for any man to be a pauper except through his own fault. To any one with preconceived ideas of South American cities as centres of lethargy, indolence, and want of enterprise, the industrial activity and abounding prosperity of S. Paulo could not but appear as astonishing. That prosperity, as most people know, was mainly due to the foresight and energy with which the Paulistas had realised and utilised the fact that their famous _terra roxa_ was adaptable for coffee-culture on a scale truly gigantic. Two years before my arrival (in 1906-07) the production of coffee in Brazil (three-fourths of it grown in S. Paulo) had reached the amazing figure