Brazil -- Description and travel; São Paulo (Brazil : State)
The next many days are a repetition of your former oceanic, tropical
temperatures, with far fewer passengers, and less ceremony, perhaps.
The sea, however, seems trying to compensate you for other lacks by
furnishing interesting creatures for you to watch. There are numberless
flying fish, frightened from the water by your ship, and the delicate,
little, pink “Portuguese men-of-war,” as the sailors call them, go
dancing by on the surface of the water in tantalizing beauty. Do not
be sorry that you cannot get one, for, trailing from that shining pink
bladder, there are processes which sting like nettles.
[Illustration: COFFEE WASHING.]
For a few days you seem almost to be crossing a wheat-field as you
take a long look across the water yellow with gulf-weed which has been
thrown off by the gulf stream and floats at rest on this quiet sea.
Take a fish line and catch some pretty branches, look at the little
fruit which grows upon them and gives the name, grapes, to the sea. It
is called by its Spanish form the Sargasso Sea.
St. Lucia pleases you to see for several reasons. You like a day in
port. You like to know what this one of the West Indies is like. You
enjoy the negroes diving under the ship for coins you throw in the
water as you did before at St. Vincent, and, on the whole, though you
have had a rarely charming summer, you are glad to cable that you are
well and leaving your last port before your arrival home.
The cool October days of the North Atlantic demand again the rugs and
warmer wraps which have been needed now and then since the journey was
begun. As the fresh air blows in your face you are delighted to find
yourself so rested and so easily challenged to an expenditure of energy.
But there are other passengers whose residence in Brazil numbers years
of work instead of weeks of pleasure. They have found themselves unable
to conquer some attack of disease without the bracing and stimulating
aid of a more rigorous climate. They are longing for cold and snow. The
Brazilian air which has relaxed and rested you has become enervating to
them. Foreign merchants and Bank managers expect six months’ furlough
once in three years. Missionaries get a year’s recruiting once in eight
years. Anxious relatives were notified before these workers left Brazil
that the wrecks were going home. Who would believe that twenty-four
days of sea-voyage could make such different looking beings of these
invalids! The prospect of home and old familiar scenes and foods seems
happiness enough to put new life into anyone, one thinks, in watching
these returning exiles.
Familiar faces are waiting on the dock. Good-by. _Ate logo._
APPENDIX.
AN AMERICAN SYSTEM OF SCHOOLS IN BRAZIL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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