After New Year we had a sudden cool spell, with a southerly wind bringing refreshing airs from the Pole; and I profited by it to extend my daily walk, visiting churches and other places of interest in and about the city. Such old Portuguese churches as the _Sé_ (cathedral) had a certain interest, though no beauty in themselves. The side altars, surmounted by fat and florid saints boxed up in arbours of artificial flowers, were painfully grotesque; and the big church was decked (for Christmastide) with {173} faded red damask which, like Mrs. Skewton's rose-coloured curtains, only made uglier what was already ugly. A scheme, however, was afoot for pulling the whole place down; and a model and plans for a great Gothic cathedral of white granite were already on exhibition in a neighbouring window, and were exciting much attention. A few of the other old churches in the city had already been demolished to make way for new ones, mostly of an uninteresting German Romanesque type, planned by German architects. Native talent, however, was responsible for the splendid theatre, its façade adorned with red granite monoliths; but the finest building in S. Paulo (perhaps in Brazil) was the creation of an Italian architect (Bezzi). This was the noble palace at Ypiranga--a site dear to Brazilians as the scene of the Proclamation of Independence in 1822--now used as a museum of ethnography and natural history, and containing collections of great and constantly increasing value and importance. S. Paulo in 1909 was--perhaps is even now, a dozen years later--a city still in the making;[4] but the intelligence of its planning, the zeal of its enterprising citizens for its extension and embellishment, and the noticeable skill and speed of the workmen (nearly all Italians) under whose hands palatial buildings were rising on every side, were full of promise for the future.