1909-1910
Since my first visit to Brazil in 1896-97, my Benedictine friends
labouring in that vast country had frequently expressed the wish that I
should, if possible, return and help them in their great work of
restoration and reconstruction, for which more labourers were urgently
needed. With health in great measure restored, and the headship of our
Oxford Hall, which I had held for ten years, passed into other hands,
the way to South America seemed once again open; and the autumn of 1909
found me fully authorized to make all necessary preparations for the
voyage. I left Fort Augustus happy in the assurance that the long
anticipated, and generally desired, reunion of our abbey with the
English mother-congregation was certain to be soon realized; and stayed
at Beaufort for a few days before going south, meeting there "Abe"
Bailey (of South African renown), Hubert Jerningham, and some other
interesting people. My last glimpse of the Highlands was a golden
afternoon spent in the White Garden (the idea of one of the daughters
of the house), and a vision of serried masses of white blossoms--I
never realized before how many shades of white there are--standing up
in their pale beauty against the dark background of trees which
encircle {152} one of the most beautiful of Scottish gardens. From
Beaufort I went to Kelburn to take leave of my sister, whom I found
entertaining her Girls' Friendly Society, assisted by twenty
bluejackets from a cruiser lying off Arran. Their commander, Lord
George Seymour, had brought his sailors by express invitation to play
about and have tea with the Friendly Girls--an arrangement which seemed
quite satisfactory to all parties! I crossed the Firth next day to say
good-bye to Lady Bute, who was in residence at her pretty home in the
Isle of Cumbrae, and went on the same afternoon to visit my hospitable
cousin Mrs. Wauchope at beautiful Niddrie. The Somersets and other
agreeable folk were my fellow-guests there; and Andrew Lang arrived
next day, and seemed--shall I say it?--a little bit "out of the
picture." I was accustomed to his small affectations and egotisms and
cynical "asides," which always seemed to me more or less of a pose; for
the eminent writer was really a very kind-hearted man, and I dare say
just as humble-minded in reality as any of us. The poor Duke of
Somerset, however, who had no affectations or pretentions of any kind,
could not do with Mr. Lang at all; and I remember his imploring me
(against my usual habit) to come and sit in the smoking-room at night,
so that they should be on no account left _tete-a-tete_! On Sunday we
all walked to see the noble ruins of Craigmillar Castle, sadly
reminiscent of poor Queen Mary, and admirably tended by their present
owner, whom we chanced to meet there, and whom I interested by a tale
(oddly enough he had never heard it) of a ghost-face on the wall of his
own house at Liberton.
At Woodburn, where I spent the following Sunday, {153} and where Lord
Ralph and Lady Anne Kerr were always delighted to welcome a priest to
officiate in their tiny oratory, I found staying with Ralph his brother
Lord Walter, whose seventieth birthday we kept as a family festival,
and who on the same day retired, as Admiral of the Fleet, from the Navy
in which he had served for fifty-six years. Our birthday expedition
was a most interesting pilgrimage to the Holy Well of St. Triduana,
near Restalrig, with its beautiful vaulted Gothic roof, recently
restored by the owner, Lord Moray.[1] The unpretentious little
Catholic chapel hard by pleased me more than the elaborate and
expensive new church recently erected at Portobello, which we also
visited. I broke my journey south at Longridge Towers, and whilst
there motored over with Sir Brooke Boothby, our Minister in Chili (an
agreeable and well-informed person) to see the poor remains of the
great convent at Coldingham--sad enough, but wonderfully interesting.
I made a farewell call at Ampleforth _en route_, lingering an hour at
York to admire the west front of the minster, from which all the
scaffolding was at length down after years of careful and patient
repairs. Hurrying through London, I travelled to Brighton and Seaford,
for the opening (by the Bishop of Southwark) of the new Ladycross
school, recently transferred from Bournemouth. There was quite a
notable gathering of old pupils and friends, and I had a charming
neighbour at luncheon in the person of Madame Navarro (Mary Anderson),
on my other {154} side being Count Riccardi-Cubitt, English-born, but a
Papal Count in right of his wife. The speeches, from the bishop, Lord
Southwell, and others, were for once commendably short.
I was bidden to meet at luncheon in London next day Princess Marie
Louise--a title unfamiliar to me: it had, in fact, been lately adopted
to avoid confusion with an aunt and cousin, both also called Louise.
We spoke of the recent re-discovery of an abbey in Lincolnshire, of
which literally not a single stone had been left above ground by the
iconoclasts of the sixteenth century. "My terrible great-uncle again,
I suppose!" said Her Highness with a deprecatory smile. The reference
was to Henry VIII.! but I hazarded a conjecture that the work of
destruction dated from later and Puritan days. I attended on this same
afternoon the marriage of my old friend Herbert Maxwell's only son to
the youngest daughter of the House of Percy, at St. Peter's, Eaton
Square, the bright and ornate interior of which contrasted cheerfully
with the mirk and mire outside. The Bishop of Peterborough, the
bride's uncle, tied the knot; and the church, and the Duchess of
Northumberland's house in Grosvenor Place afterwards, were thronged
with Percys and Campbells and Glyns.
After two busy days at Oxford, devoted to packing up and to taking
hasty farewells of kind old friends (both things I detest), I went down
to Hampshire to spend the Sunday previous to sailing with my brother at
Kneller Court. The omens were inauspicious, for it blew hard all day,
with torrents of rain. Next morning, however, was calm and bright as
we motored to Southampton, where I boarded {155} R.M.S.P. _Aragon_,
nearly 5,000 tons bigger than the good old _Magdalena_. We sailed at
noon, crossed to Cherbourg in perfect weather, and found the Bay of
Biscay next day all smiles and dimples and sunshine. I did not land at
Lisbon, having seen it all before, and having no friends there. We
dropped quietly down the Tagus at sundown, just when points of light
were breaking out over the city, and all the church bells seemed to be
ringing the Angelus. We had a full ship, and our voyage was
diversified by the usual sports, of which I was an "honorary
president," my colleagues in that sinecure office being a Brazilian
coffee-king, the President-elect of Argentina, and a Belgian Baron.
There were four Scotsmen at my table in the saloon, three of them
Davids! Somewhere about the Equator we kept the birthday of King
Edward, whose health was pledged by Brazilians and Argentinos as
cordially and enthusiastically as by the British. I wrote to Fritz
Ponsonby to tell him of this, for His Majesty's information.[2] Two
days later we sighted the low green shores of Brazil. I looked with
interest at the well-remembered heights of Olinda, with the white walls
of S. Bento shining {156} in the morning sun. Somehow I did not
picture myself stationed there again, though a newspaper which came
aboard at Pernambuco announced, I noticed, that "o conhecido
educationalista sr. David Hurter-blais" was coming to that city "afim
de tratar da educacao religiosa das classes populares!" The passengers
for Pernambuco, I observed, were now chucked into the Company's lighter
in a basket (in West African style), instead of having to "shin" down a
dangerous companion in a heavy swell, as we used to do. Two
lank-haired red-brown Indians, who came on board here to sell feather
fans and such things, interested me; and I recalled how Emerson had
described the aboriginals of North America as the "provisional
races"--"the red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before
the colours for the real manhood were ready."
My destination on this voyage was not, as thirteen years previously,
the steaming Equatorial State of Pernambuco, and the venerable
half-derelict city of Olinda, whither our Benedictine pioneers had come
out from Europe soon after the fall of the Brazilian Empire, just in
time, as it seemed, to save the Benedictine Order in that vast country
from collapse and utter extinction. From Olinda the arduous work of
revival and restoration had gone quietly and steadily on, including one
by one the ancient and almost abandoned abbeys of the old Brazilian
Congregation; and it was to one of these, the monastery of our Order in
the great and growing city of S. Paulo, that my steps were now turned.
Bahia, two days voyage from Pernambuco, is a city to which (like
Constantinople) distance very decidedly lends enchantment, and I did
not land {157} there. It was raining fast, and the fantastic hilltops
were wrapped in clouds, as we entered Rio Bay. I was welcomed by a
kind Belgian monk whom I had known at Olinda in 1896, and who drove me
up to our fine old Portuguese abbey, standing on its own mount or
_morro_ close to the sea, where I had paid my respects to the last of
the old Brazilian abbots a dozen years before. A vigorous young
community now occupied the long-empty cells; and the conduct of a
flourishing college, as well as pastoral work of various kinds outside,
gave scope to their energy and zeal.
The weather next day was perfect, and my friend Dom Amaro devoted two
or three hours to driving me round the City Beautiful. Beautiful, of
course, it had always been; but I was astounded at the transformation
which had taken place in four short years. From "the cemetery of the
foreigner," as Rio had been called when its name, like those of Santos,
Havana and Panama, had been almost synonymous with pestilence and
death, it had become one of the healthiest, as it had always been one
of the loveliest, capitals in the world. Four men--Brazilians
all--minister of works, engineer, doctor, and prefect of the city,[3]
had undertaken in 1905 the gigantic task of the city's sanitation. The
extermination of the mosquitoes which caused yellow fever and malaria,
the destruction of their breeding-places, the widening of malodorous
streets, the demolition of thousands of buildings, the disinfection
{158} and removal of tens of thousands of tons of garbage, the
filling-up of swamps and marshes, were only preliminary to the colossal
work of reconstruction of which I saw some of the results. Right
through the central city was pierced the new Avenida, a broad
thoroughfare lined with noble buildings, of which the theatre, built at
enormous cost, and rivalling the Paris Opera, struck me most. More
striking still was the new Beira Mar, the unique sea-drive skirting the
bay for four miles, and leading to the equally beautiful circular
esplanade round the Bay of Botafogo. Here I left cards and letters of
introduction on the British Minister (who, I may remark _en passant_,
never took the slightest notice of either,)[4]; and we drove homewards
in a golden sunset, the whole city flushed with rosy light, and the
heights of Corcovado and the Organ Mountains glowing purple--as purple
as the evening tints of Hymettus and Pentelicus which gave to Athens
the immortal name of [Greek: Iostephanos], the violet-crowned. Behind
us the pointed Sugar-loaf rose grey and menacing into the opal sky; and
I recalled the quaint Brazilian tradition which tells how the Creator,
when He had made the Bay of Rio and found it very good, desired to call
man's admiring attention to His masterpiece by a mark of exclamation.
The mark of exclamation is the Sugar-loaf! We met in the Avenida,
returning from a grand _formatura_ (review) in honour of the day (it
was the anniversary of the foundation of the Republic), the
President--a {159} mulatto, by the way--and his staff, in a none too
gorgeous gala carriage. I was told that he was extremely popular.
To reach S. Paulo from Rio I had the choice of two routes, the
pleasanter being that by sea to Santos, and an ascent thence to the
inland city by one of the most wonderful of the world's railways. But
as I wished to see something of the country, I chose the twelve hours'
train journey direct from the capital--and repented my choice; for
though the first part of the route was through fine scenery, as we
climbed the lofty Serra which stretches for miles along the Brazilian
coast, the dust, heat and jolting of the train soon grew almost
insufferable. I was very glad to reach S. Paulo, where the air was
pleasantly cool and fresh (the city stands 2,100 feet above the sea,
and just outside the tropical zone[5]), and where the kind abbot of S.
Bento, whom I had known up to then only by correspondence, met me at
the station. We were soon at his monastery, which was well situated,
occupying a whole side of one of the principal squares of the city, and
of historic interest as built on the same spot where, three hundred and
ten years before, the first Benedictine foundation in the then village
of S. Paulo had been made by Frei Mauro Texeira, a zealous and fervent
monk of Bahia. The monastery, as I knew it in 1909, was an
unpretentious building of the early eighteenth century, constructed not
of stone but of _taipa_ (compressed earth), its long {160} whitewashed
front pierced by ten windows, and flanked by the facade of the church
with its low cupola'd tower. My host, Abbot Miguel, who had been
appointed prior of the restored abbey in 1900, and abbot seven years
later, had inaugurated in 1903 a school for boys, which numbered at my
arrival some 300 pupils. For their accommodation, and for that of his
growing community, he had done all that was possible with the old and
inadequate buildings of the monastery, to which he had built on various
additions. But he and his community had already decided that a
complete reconstruction of both abbey and church was absolutely
essential for the development of their educational and other work; and
I found them all studying and discussing ornate and elaborate plans by
a well-known Bavarian architect, who had "let himself go" in a west
front apparently in English Elizabethan style (recalling Hatfield), and
a Byzantine church with Perpendicular Gothic details and two lofty
towers.[6] The process of demolition, commencing with the choir of the
old church, was started a few weeks after I reached S. Paulo; and I
remember that we were nearly asphyxiated by the falling and crumbling
walls, which (as I have said) were built of a kind of adobe or dried
mud, and broke into thick clouds of blinding yellow dust as they
tumbled about our ears.
The rebuilding of the Benedictine Abbey was only {161} one feature, and
not the most considerable, of the architectural transformation which
was taking place before one's eyes in every part of S. Paulo, and was
developing it from an insignificant provincial capital into one of the
largest and most progressive cities of South America. In twenty years
the population had increased tenfold--from fifty thousand to nearly
half a million--and two facts struck me as both remarkable and
encouraging, namely that the birth-rate was more than double the
death-rate, and was (so I was told) more than double that of
London--nearly thirty-six per thousand. The State and city of S. Paulo
were alike cosmopolitan, 300,000 immigrants (more than half of them
Italians) having entered the country in the year before my arrival, and
more than half the population being of foreign birth. The vast
majority of the day-labourers in the city were Italians, on the whole
an industrious and thrifty race (though not without obvious faults),
who assimilated themselves without difficulty to the country of their
adoption. The rapidly growing prosperity of S. Paulo was shown by the
astonishing appreciation in a few years of the value of land in and
around the city--exceeding, so I was assured by a prominent American,
any phenomenon of the kind in the United States. Our Abbot had, not
long before my arrival, acquired with wise prescience a fine country
estate in the eastern outskirts, which was already worth at least ten
times what he had expended on its purchase. The _chacara_ (as such
properties are called) included a fine old house of Imperial days,
garden, farm, orchard, extensive woods, as well as a lake, football
fields, playgrounds and a rifle-range; and here our young pupils spent
{162} one day every week enjoying the open-air life and sports
unattainable in the city.
The college, or _gymnasio_, of S. Bento had already taken its
recognised place among the best educational institutions of S. Paulo.
The fathers were assisted in the work of teaching by a competent staff
of lay masters, but retained the religious, moral, and disciplinary
training of their pupils entirely in their own hands; and I was pleased
to see how eminently suited the paternal and family spirit
characteristic of Benedictine education was to Brazilian boys, and how
well on the whole they responded to the efforts of their instructors to
instil into them those habits of obedience, self-control, and moral
responsibility, in which the home training of the children of Latin
America is often so deplorably deficient. Naturally docile, pious, and
intelligent, these little boys were brought under the salutary
influence of S. Bento at an age when there seemed every hope that they
would be tided safely over the difficult years of early adolescence,
and moulded, under solid Christian guidance, into efficient and worthy
citizens of their State and their country.[7] English was taught by an
American priest, who was also an excellent musician, and trained our
little choristers very successfully. Several of the fathers spoke
English well; but I was the only British-born member of the community,
and I was naturally glad of opportunities to meet the scattered English
{163} Catholics who were to be found among the not very numerous
British resident colony. Our little old church, unattractive enough as
to externals, was yet greatly frequented by those (and they were many)
who appreciated the careful reverence of the ceremonial and grave
beauty of the monastic chant. Sermons in Portuguese and German were
already preached regularly at the Sunday masses; and to these was added
soon after my arrival an English sermon, which was very well attended.
One came sometimes in the hospitals of the city, which I visited
regularly, on stray Englishmen of another class--an injured railwayman,
perhaps, or a sick sailor from a British ship, who were glad enough,
even if not Catholics, of a friendly visit from a countryman. I
remember a young Englishman from Warrington in Lancashire (this was one
of the consoling cases), who was dying of some obscure tropical disease
in the Santa Casa, the chief hospital of the city. It was the hottest
time of year, and he suffered much, but never once murmured or
complained. He had been baptized by a Benedictine (but eighteen years
before) in his native town in England, and he looked on it, as he said,
as "a bit of real luck" to be tended by a Benedictine on his death-bed.
"O santinho inglez" (the little English saint) his nurses called him;
and his death--he was never free from pain to the last--was truly the
death of the just, and made an ineffaceable impression on those who
witnessed it. _Fiant novissima mea hujus similia!_
I soon fell into the routine of our Brazilian monastic day, which
differed a good deal (especially as to the hours for meals) from our
European time-tables. {164} Coffee betimes; breakfast ("almoco")
before noon; dinner at half-past five, after vespers, suited the school
hours, and the busy life of the community. We anticipated matins at
seven p.m.; hurried to the refectory for a dish of scalding tea
(smothered in sugar, no milk), or a glass of lemonade, then hastened
back to choir for night prayers and sundry pious exercises. This final
collation (if it may be so called) was really alarming: the scorching
tea was gulped down with a reckless rapidity which reminded one of
Quilp tossing off the hissing rum in his riverside arbour! and I used
to return to choir positively perspiring. But our commissariat was on
the whole good, if simple; we had no such privations to face as in old
days at Olinda, and as far as I was concerned the kind abbot was always
on the alert to see that I wanted for nothing. Our chacara supplied us
with farm produce of the best; and great platters of green and purple
grapes, from the same source, were at this season served up at every
meal.
The abbot, on his first free day, drove me round the interesting city.
We visited a fine girls' school, conducted by Augustinian canonesses;
the superior was sister to an Anglo-Irish Benedictine, and another nun
was a Macpherson, with an accent of that ilk. We saw, also, two
institutions founded by the Abbot, St. Adalbert's Parochial schools,
under nuns of St. Catherine, and a hospital managed by sisters of the
same Order. The hospital stood at the end of the Avenida Paulista, a
noble boulevard lined with handsome houses of every imaginable style of
architecture--Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish, Swiss, Venetian, classical,
rococo, each one in its own glowing and luxuriant garden. This,
naturally, was the rich {165} man's quarter; the working people had of
course their own dwellings, chiefly in the populous industrial district
of Braz. But I saw no slums in S. Paulo, and nowhere the depressing
contrast between ostentatious luxury and poverty-stricken squalor which
is the blot on so many European cities. In S. Paulo there was, in
fact, no poverty:[8] there was work and employment and food for all;
and it is true to say there was no need for any man to be a pauper
except through his own fault. To any one with preconceived ideas of
South American cities as centres of lethargy, indolence, and want of
enterprise, the industrial activity and abounding prosperity of S.
Paulo could not but appear as astonishing. That prosperity, as most
people know, was mainly due to the foresight and energy with which the
Paulistas had realised and utilised the fact that their famous _terra
roxa_ was adaptable for coffee-culture on a scale truly gigantic. Two
years before my arrival (in 1906-07) the production of coffee in Brazil
(three-fourths of it grown in S. Paulo) had reached the amazing figure
of twenty million sacks, five times what it had been a quarter of a
century before. Then, when the supply was found to exceed the demand,
when prices fell by leaps and bounds, and financial disaster seemed
imminent, the shrewd Paulistas conceived and adopted the
much-criticised expedient of "valorisation," the State itself
purchasing an enormous quantity of the crop, and holding it up until
prices became again normal. It was in this and in many {166} other
ways that the Paulistas showed the clearsightedness and acumen which
justly gained for their State and their capital the reputation of being
the most enterprising and progressive on the whole South American
continent.
The abbot and I finished our afternoon's drive with a little expedition
to Cantareira, a hollow among wooded hills, some twelve or fourteen
miles distant (the access is by a steam tramway), where, set in
charming gardens, are some of the spacious reservoirs feeding the city.
We drank our coffee in a rustic arbour, with bright-hued hummingbirds
glancing and circling round our heads; and returning in the luminous
violet twilight (which struck me always as particularly beautiful in
this clear, high smokeless atmosphere), called to pay our respects to
the Archbishop of the province and diocese of S. Paulo. A zealous
parish priest in the city, where he had built a fine church (St.
Cecilia's), he had been made Bishop of Coritiba at only thirty, and
translated to the metropolitan see two years later. He was not yet
thirty-eight.
I assisted, before our school broke up for the three months' summer
holidays, at some of the examinations, which were conducted in presence
of a _fiscal_ (Government official), our college being at that time
considered "equiparado," i.e., equivalent to the State secondary
schools, a condition of the privilege being some kind of more or less
nominal Government inspection. The school work, it struck me, had all
been very thoroughly done, though perhaps of a somewhat elementary
kind. A distraction to us all during the last hour was the news of a
great fire raging in the principal business street of the {167} city.
A big German warehouse, the Casa Allema, was in fact burned to the
ground; and we surveyed the conflagration (said, but never proved, to
be the work of incendiaries) from the belfry of our church tower.
The North American element in S. Paulo, though much smaller than it
became later, was already fairly numerous. A great Canadian company
was responsible for the supply of light and power to S. Paulo as well
as Rio; some of the leading officials in both cities were Catholics,
and became my kind friends. Another hospitable friend was a Scots
banker married to an American wife, whom he habitually addressed as
"Honey!"[9] There was, generally, a very friendly and hospitable
spirit among the English-speaking residents; but (as usual in foreign
cities) it was curiously confined to the circle of their own
countrymen. Some of my Brazilian acquaintances used to express regret
that the English colony, for which they had much respect, never evinced
the least desire for any sort of intimacy with them; and it used to
surprise me to find English families which had been settled in the
country for a whole generation or more, of which not a single member
knew sufficient Portuguese to carry on a quarter of an hour's
conversation with an educated Brazilian of their own class.
Personally, I found such Brazilians as I had the pleasure of meeting
{168} almost uniformly extremely agreeable people--kind, courteous,
cultivated, and refined; and I thought, and still think, the insular
aloofness of my countrymen from the people among whom it was their lot
to live, a distinct disadvantage to themselves, and a mistake from
every point of view.
It was a curious fact, and one worthy of attention from several points
of view, that at the time of which I am writing the public and official
interest of the Paulistas in educational matters, while undoubtedly
exceeding that of any other community in the Republic, was in practice
almost confined to primary schools. Nearly L400,000, a fifth of the
whole annual budget of the State, was devoted to their support and
extension; many of the school buildings were of almost palatial
appearance; the code was carefully thought out, and the teaching as a
whole efficient; and elementary education was, at least in principle,
obligatory, though the provisions of the law of 1893, which had
established a commission for bringing negligent parents to book and
fining them for non-compliance with the law, were to a great extent a
dead letter. For secondary education, on the other hand, the public
provision was of the slenderest: there were in 1909 but three State
secondary schools in the State of S. Paulo--at Campinas and Ribeirao
Preto, and in the capital; and the Lyceu in the last-named city (with a
population of over 400,000) numbered less than 150 pupils. The
all-important work of the education of the middle and upper classes of
children, both boys and girls, thus fell inevitably into the hands of
private teachers, the best colleges for both sexes (mostly _internatos_
{169} or boarding-schools) being conducted by foreign religious orders.
These institutions, receiving no State subvention of any kind, were
regarded by the State with a tolerance due less to its appreciation of
the principles on which their education was based, than to an obvious
sense of the economic advantage of leaving private associations to
undertake a work which it neglected itself. The net gain of this
policy of _laisser aller_ was that a large number of children,
belonging to the classes on which depended the future prosperity of the
country, were being carefully educated on solid Christian foundations,
without, as far as I could observe at S. Bento and elsewhere, any
sacrifice of the patriotic principles which Brazil quite rightly
desired should be instilled into the rising generation of her sons and
daughters.
[1] St. Trid's Well (as it was called before the Reformation) had the
repute of miraculously curing diseases of the eye. A satirical
sixteenth-century poet scoffs at the folk who flock to "Saint Trid's to
mend their ene."
[2] The King (so his secretary wrote to me) was "much surprised and
gratified" at hearing how the toast of his health had been received by
the foreign passengers on an English ship. I sent on the letter from
S. Paulo to the captain, who said it should be framed and hung up on
board, but I never heard if this was done. Edward VII. died less than
six months later, and on December 30, 1917, the _Aragon_, whilst on
transport service in the Mediterranean, was torpedoed (together with
her escort H.M.S. _Attack_), a few miles from Alexandria. The ship
went down within half an hour of being struck, with a loss of more than
six hundred lives.
[3] Their names are worthy of perpetuation--Lauro Muller, Paulo
Frontin, Pareiro Passo (the Haussmann of Brazil), and Dr. Oswaldo Cruz,
a pupil of Pasteur, and popularly known as the _mata-mosquitos_
(mosquito-killer).
[4] This lapse from diplomatic courtesy on the part of Sir William
Haggard was, I take pleasure in recalling, amply atoned for later by
the kindness I received from two of his successors as British
representative in Rio.
[5] The Tropic of Capricorn passes through S. Paulo--I had even heard
said, through the monastery garden of S. Bento. "Let us dig and look
for it," said one of my little pupils to whom I imparted this supposed
geographical fact.
[6] When I saw S. Bento (after a long interval) eleven years later, the
new buildings (except for the internal decoration of the church) were
practically complete. Many of the details were no doubt open to
criticism, and were in fact rather severely criticised; but it was a
tribute to the architect that the general effect of his work was
recognized as being both dignified and impressive.
[7] When I returned to S. Paulo eleven years later, I heard with
pleasure from the parents of some of our former pupils of the
satisfactory way in which their sons had turned out--a happy result
which they attributed to the excellence of their upbringing at S. Bento.
[8] Let me note once for all that whatever I say about S. Paulo, here
and elsewhere, is founded (facts and figures alike) on what I knew and
learned of the city in 1909-10. A dozen years may, and do, bring many
changes!
[9] "Honey!" said an American bride (returning from an early morning
walk) at a door--which she imagined to be that of the nuptial
chamber--in the corridor of a big hotel; "honey! it's me: let me in."
No response. "Honey! it's me, it's Mamie: open the door." Still no
answer. "Honey! honey! don't you hear? it's me, honey." Gruff
(unknown) male voice: "Madam, this is not a beehive, it's a bathroom!"
{170}