You go to see the National Art Gallery and find a few good pictures of local feeling or history, but otherwise the work of artists who have studied in Paris. You have climbed one precipice of five hundred feet by the “Plano inclinado,” looked down over the brilliant city flecked with palms, and followed the substantial aqueduct “built by the Jesuits” long ago, which brings water into town from the heights, over arches at first low, but rising about a hundred feet across one valley. The masonry is stuccoed, moss-grown, fern-draped; the water pure and refreshing. You ascend to the top of Corcovado, twenty-five hundred feet high, by another cog-wheel railroad, and find a little shelter-house at the peak from which you see the wonderful view of city, bay, other mountains and ocean bathed in light; then hurry down to get the “barca,” the large fine ferry-boat which takes you ten miles across the bay on your way to Petropolis. It leaves at four in the afternoon. How you love that sail in the soft air across that beautiful bay! You look forward to the great Organ Mountains up which you will soon be climbing, and wonder what harmonies came from those giant fluted pipes when the morning stars sang together. You have good company, English, German and American in addition to the Brazilian. Too soon you are in the train which speeds along the few level miles, then dismembers and climbs the heavy grade in sections. You will never forget the outlook from these windows and wonder if so much beauty has existed all these years known to so few. PETROPOLIS. Four thousand feet up, and back from all sight of the harbor, you reach Petropolis, built first as the summer residence of the Emperor, Dom Pedro, and named for himself. It is a beautiful town, the home of rich Brazilians, foreign merchants and foreign legations, for it is the diplomatic center. While you stay at the English Pensáo Honoria, some ship-friends are near by at the Hungarian Pensáo Central, both with unusually good food and service. In the garden great bushes of the camelia are covered with waxen blossoms and the poinsettia blazes beside a hedge of heliotrope. Humming-birds dart in and out among the shrubs. Through the middle of every street runs the mountain stream in a stone-curbed channel, spanned by Indian-red bridges at the street crossings. [Illustration] Dom Pedro was the “village improvement society,” and the main street is still called the “Rua Imperador” although it was renamed when he was banished. The town follows the narrow valleys between hills always green. The gardens are bewildering in their profusion of flowers. Lilies blossom as they do in California. Orange trees perfume the air. The verandas are but a step up from the ground, and the rooms open upon the verandas. You feel little need for a house. Only hotels and palaces are two stories high; the rest are one.