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torn to rags and strips by the black fangs of its rocky bed.

The Povoação, or village of São Paulo, showed by its position the master-hand of the Jesuits, who, after years of stormy discussion, had succeeded in transferring to it the rights and privileges of the ruined township Santo André; and thus the religious had thriven by the death and decay of the laical settlement. The site of the successful rival was a ridge of red clay, about a mile in length by half that breadth, bounded on the north by the wide and often flooded valley of the Tiété, or "Good-water river," an affluent of the mighty Paraná-Plata. On the east, under a precipitous slope, flows the Tamanduátahy—"the stream of the ant-eater"—a narrow but deep and dangerous feeder of the main artery; while to the west is the valley of a similar but even smaller feature, the Anhangabahú—Black-devil water—a branchlet of the Tamanduatahy.

During the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, São Paulo contained only three or four hundred houses, for the most part simple cottages, walled with pisé or rough concrete, and roofed with thatch or tile; of these, hardly one in ten belonged to families in easy circumstances, whilst four or five large churches made the mean habitations look meaner still. No neat "chacara" or villa rose from the orchard and the garden which now combine the jasmine and the rose, the pink and the myrtle. The long streets were traced with tolerably straight lines; the cross-alleys were compelled by the slopes to use the rudest steps of granite and "bullock's blood," a deep-red sandstone brought from the neighbouring mountains. Wheeled vehicles were, of course, unknown, and the mules were sometimes engulfed in the mud-holes that yawned between the pavement slabs.

Commanding the eminence, whose feet were washed by the Tamanduatahy, and on the highest and most