In few cities is there such a display of great wealth. The main street, the Avenida Central, is wide and beautiful, and the sidewalks are of coarse mosaic. There are numerous palatial buildings, though some of them are too ornate to appeal to North American taste, and gold-leaf and carved marble have been used lavishly in their decoration. The public squares, filled with the finest of tropical trees and plants, give a park-like appearance to at least parts of the city. Of interest to the tourist, perhaps, are the numerous curio-shops filled with a varied assortment of almost everything ranging from minute, brilliantly hued beetles, to feather flowers and the skins of anacondas. Brazil is of course popularly believed to be the land of huge snakes; one dealer calmly told us that he frequently had skins forty _metres_ long, but the longest he happened to possess measured less than twenty feet in length. The number of stories in common circulation concerning serpents of monstrous proportions in South American countries, is astonishing; and it was interesting to note that the farther south we went, the longer the reptiles grew. Thus, in Barranquilla, near the Caribbean coast of Colombia, I was told that specimens thirty feet long were to be had frequently; this did not seem quite probable. In Venezuela thirty-five feet was not considered unusual, and I was sorry that none were to be obtained during my visit. In British Guiana, snakes forty feet long were said to be fairly common, although I could find no one who had actually seen one of that size. The climax was reached in Rio de Janeiro, when a curio-dealer told about the forty-metre snakes. I frankly expressed my doubts, and he proceeded to tell of how a man standing beside a snake of this size, that was coiled up, could not look over the top of it--it was such a great heap. It must be admitted that Brazil with its great Amazon basin produces many strange and unusual creatures; but when it comes to one-hundred-foot snakes, it can only be said that there is absolutely no proof of their existence. No dealer I ever visited, and there were many, could ever produce a skin over twenty feet long.