Page:Iracéma, the honey-lips (1886).djvu/125

The Brazilian traveller of our modern day who runs up by the Santos and Jundiahy Railway to São Paulo, the capital of a great province also so named, finds but little that can suggest what was that very heroic city in the earlier years of the seventeenth century. There is the same enchanting atmosphere, at times portentously lustrous and transparent; the same grateful mixture of tropical and temperate vegetation, the banana rustling in the cool shadow of the pine and the palm; the same glorious day under the Tropic of Capricorn, whose line passes within a mile or two of the suburbs, and the same bright healthful night of Central Europe colouring the cheeks and strengthening the frames of the inhabitants.

But the streets are now laid down with macadam; the old stockades and walls, which defended the young settlement, have made way for house and homestead; the rivers and rivulets have been bridged; the tenements, formerly restricted to a door and a single window outside, and inside to a "but and a ben," have become double storeys, with painted façades,