“There is still a suggestion of the old world and grand manner. They have their Academy of Forty Immortals; their politicians are often pleased to practice the politer arts. Senhor Joahim Nabuco, who presided at the conference, has written his ‘_Pensées_.’ These littérateurs may be, as Senhor Bomfim suggests in ‘_A America Latina_,’ ‘inveterate rhetoricians whose abundant works are taken as a proof of genius.’ Yet at least they have a certain way with them. Pompous, grave, they go through the solemn motions. In spite of the vast majority who neither read nor write, Brazilians of the upper class are probably more ‘cultured,’ in the narrow literary sense of the word, than our average man of the same class at home. They speak and write French as a matter of course in addition to their own language, and most of them make fair headway with English. They enjoy and encourage music and painting and poetry. Opera not only comes to Rio each winter as it does to Buenos Aires, but they have their National Institute of Music and their native composers, one of whom especially, the late Carlos Gomez, has heard his operas successfully produced in Europe. They have their National Academy of Fine Arts and a gallery which, I am sure, is visited and appreciated more than the really excellent one tucked away upstairs in Buenos Aires’ Calle Florida.” III As already said, from Rio one may go to São Paulo, the second largest—and, with the exception of Rio, the most important—city in the country, by railroad, and almost as comfortably, too, as one may travel from New York to Chicago. The city of São Paulo is the capital of the State of that name, the great land of coffee, the land in fact that produces more than half of all the coffee grown in Brazil, and Brazil as a whole produces more than three-fourths of all that the world consumes. The city has a population of about 350,000, and is located in the mountains, about forty miles back from the coast and three thousand feet above the level of the sea. It is connected by railroad with Santos, its seaport, where the best docks in the country are now. These two cities, though founded in early colonial times, are not quite as interestingly characteristic as Rio and the others that have been mentioned, for they are far enough south to be in the temperate zone, and have, therefore, attracted a very much larger foreign element, particularly German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. There are not so many negroes and mixed breeds among the laboring classes, and their institutions, business methods and social life more nearly resemble our own; and, as a consequence, they have certainly not been behind the rest of Brazil in development. As in Rio, enormous sums have recently been spent for sanitation, public buildings, and improvements.