Rio, of course, has all the up-to-date public utilities—electric street-car lines, lights, telephones, taxicabs and the rest; but, as Arthur Ruhl so aptly puts it, “Before the things seen and heard and vaguely felt,” in this city of such strange, peculiar charm, “the endless procession of vague, unrelated things that baffle and allure—semi-antique humans living languidly in the midst of a sun-drenched nature, which, by its very luxuriance, might seem to have overpowered them—Latin sensibility tinged with African superstition—negro coachmen in top-boots, such as Puss-in-Boots might have worn—dusky, velvet-eyed _donzellas_—palms, blazing walls and indigo sea—one loses interest in railroads and power plants and the things we do better at home. Brazilians must interest themselves in such things, for therein lies their salvation. If I seem to neglect them, it is because it seems absurd to visit a conservatory full of orchids and spend one’s time seeing how the steam-pipes are put in. By the same token,” he adds— “There is a certain mellowed dignity in the Brazilian scene—the natural inheritance of the empire, and doubtless, also, a reaction of race and climate—lacking in the more energetic Argentina. It was only in 1889 that good Dom Pedro—that kindly, cultured, old-school gentleman—was dethroned and shipped off to Portugal. It is only since 1887 that the negroes ceased to be slaves. Brazil’s foremost statesman, the big, able Minister of Foreign Affairs, who, as he moved amongst his slender Caribbean brethren at the 1906 conference, looked like the senior partner of some old firm of Wall Street bankers, is still called ‘Baron’ Rio Branco. You can still see in Petropolis the house of the Princess Regent and her husband, the Conde d’Eu, overgrown somewhat with vegetation and buried in somber shades. Rio’s great public library was started by King João VI himself when the Portuguese court was transferred to Brazil in 1808.