There is one train up from Santos to São Paulo at dawn and one after business hours. A coffee merchant has extended the courtesy of the club-car which daily brings and returns the bankers and merchants of this busy but sickly port. Half the men in this car are Brazilian, some of pure Portuguese descent, others with strains of African or Indian blood; the remainder are German, English and American. The journey takes two hours and a half, so they proceed to play poker, with a few exceptions, who prefer chess or cribbage, or have a big “home mail.” They are all too accustomed to these beautiful mountains to look out of the windows as you do, except to count coffee cars and estimate to-morrow’s receipts. You see many air-plants lodged among the trees with spikes of pink blossoms, which look like hyacinths at a little distance. Close by you would think the hyacinth much prettier and like its fragrance better. The tropical forest is an impenetrable thicket. You see the face of it only. A car going up the mountain must be attached to a cable weighted at the other end by a balancing car going down the parallel track. In this way passengers and thousands of carloads of coffee are transported by three successive, long, steep inclines. At the top you wait until all the cars of your train are cabled up; the train is joined and starts for São Paulo, over level, open country. Judging from the din of porters and carriages at the station, São Paulo is very much alive. The hotel is in the midst of stores. You are taken to a suite of two huge rooms and asked a great price. You had said you wanted one room. Argument ensues. The rooms belong together. You affirm that you will have but one. There is no access to the farther room but through yours; would you afflict the hotel? You persist in taking the one, and at night hear voices in the other and know the owners found their resting-place by some other door than yours. That was only a white lie. That’s nothing! After dinner you rest in an Austrian bentwood chair (the universally prized furniture, with no upholstery for insects and dampness, nor joints which come unglued), and read your lesson; for in traveling one reads all the available literature about the place one is visiting. It is little in English you have found about the city of São Paulo. You know it is now the educational center of all Brazil: that it is more than three hundred years old, with 200,000 people; that it has furnished two Presidents for the new republic, and many statesmen; that it has a charming mingling of tropical and temperate climates: that England, France and Germany have the import business rather than the United States.