St. Benedict's feast this year fell after Easter; and we kept it with solemn services in our diminished church (which was packed to the doors), an eloquent panegyric preached by the vicar-general, and a good many guests in the refectory. The fare was lavish--too lavish for the temperature: there were soup, fish, oysters and prawns, three courses of meat, "tarts and tidiness," and great platters of fruit, khakis (persimmons), mamoes, abacaxis (small pineapples), etc. "Oh! Todgers's could do it when it liked!"[8] I sat for a while afterwards with our U.S.A. padre, just returned from a week's trip on an American steamer. He had grown restive under the sumptuary laws (cassock-wearing, etc.) of our archdiocese, and as soon as the school holidays began, had donned his straw hat and monkey-jacket, and gone off to enjoy himself on the _Vasari_. He was very good company, and full of quaint Yankee tales and reminiscences. I recall one of his stories about a man who thought he could draw, and used {178} to send his sketches to the editor of a picture-paper whom he knew. Meeting his friend one day, he asked him why his contributions were never used. "Well, the fact is," said the editor, "I have an aunt living in Noo Jersey, who can _knit_ better pictures than yours!" On May 1 my friend Father Caton and I, desirous of seeing something of one important element of the heterogeneous population of S. Paulo, witnessed a procession of Garibaldians on their way to inaugurate a statue of their hero in one of the public gardens. A sinister crowd they were, members of some fifty Italian clubs and associations here, Socialist, masonic, revolutionary and anti-Christian, whose gods are Mazzini, Carducci, and their like. Round the statue was gathered a mass of their countrymen--some ten or twelve thousand at least, mostly Calabrians of a low type,[9] who greeted with frantic applause a hysterical oration, with the usual denunciations of Popes and priests and kings, from a fanatical firebrand called Olavo Bilac. A humiliating spectacle on a May-day Sunday in the Catholic capital of a Catholic State; but a large proportion of these Italian immigrants were in truth the scum of their own country and of Christendom. Our abbot, whose zeal and charity extended to all nationalities in this cosmopolitan city, had established, with the help of some Brazilian ladies, a free night-school for the crowds of little shoeblacks and newspaper-sellers, practically all Italians. He preached at their periodical First Communion festivals, entertained them afterwards to a joyful breakfast (at which I {179} sometimes assisted with much pleasure), and did his best to keep in touch with them as they grew up. I remember a great Italian audience (of the better sort) in our college hall one evening, witnessing with delighted enthusiasm three little plays, one in Portuguese and two in Italian, acted extremely well by a troupe of the abbot's young Italian _protégés_. With all his