extravagantly ornamental frontages evince the Brazilian taste for show and showy things. The town is very straggling and winding, on account of the many hills that break into the plateau on which the city stands. But the vistas and views that the irregularity of the plan introduces are an ample compensation for the detours round the buttresses of the mountain range. At the end of the Avenida stands a very graceful white building, the Monroe Palace, in which the Pan-American Congress was held in 1906, and a little further down the magnificent Municipal Theatre, modelled somewhat on the lines of the Paris Opera House. The best companies from Paris and the Continent find in it a stage and auditorium equal to anything they have been accustomed to. Unfortunately, the municipal authorities have not equipped their expensively built Opera Palace with scenery to match. The stage properties are exceedingly inadequate and inappropriate for such a theatre, and the companies who sometimes perform in it. The stage is enormous, and the actors’ dressing and retiring rooms lofty and well devised. The interior is handsomely decorated although it is hardly equal to the new theatre in São Paulo, which is the finest theatre in South America. At the other side of the Avenida Central stands the new National Library, which contains a quarter of a million volumes, and next to it the Palace of Fine Arts, both imposing buildings. In the latter there is plenty of room for more works of art. There are in the Avenida many handsome buildings and many styles; the newspaper offices are conspicuous, those of _La Paiz_, _The Journal do Commercio_, and the _Journal do Brazil_ stand out prominently from other buildings. The large classic building with gilded capitals at the northern extremity of this avenue, is the Treasury, which was built to hold the gold bullion, held as guarantee against the paper currency of the republic. The “Ouvidor,” which, although renamed, still goes by its original appellation, is a narrow, crowded thoroughfare. Its shops are among the best in the city, however, and the fashionable inhabitants throng its pavements in the afternoons. It holds much the same position in Rio as the “Florida” does in Buenos Ayres, although it is not so extensive as the latter. Perhaps the most striking feature in both of these streets is the enormous prices charged for their wares. The fashions from Paris find a ready sale in Rio, and the more daring they are the greater are their chances of success. Nothing in a French mode would shock a “Fluminense,” but they are very particular in seeing that their wives and daughters are properly escorted when they go abroad. A young lady would never dream of walking or even talking in public to a male friend of the family unless a proper chaperon were present. The old, almost Oriental, customs of Portugal and Spain still persist, even in their emancipated colonies. Until women are