Brazil, the Amazons and the coast .. . a vast deal of piano-strumming vul-garity. There are some admirable public institutions at Rio;hospitals, asylums, a polytechnic college, academies, and soon. Some of the city parks are very pretty, and away be-yond Botafogo there is the Botanic Garden, with its splendid avenue of royalpalms, a hundredfeet high ; you willremember the fineengraving of thisavenue, in M book. Be-sides the palm -avenue, there areshady walks, andgroves of tropicaltrees, and greenlawns, such as yourarely find at a fine afternoon,the garden is full ofll pleas
Brazil, the Amazons and the coast .. . a vast deal of piano-strumming vul-garity. There are some admirable public institutions at Rio;hospitals, asylums, a polytechnic college, academies, and soon. Some of the city parks are very pretty, and away be-yond Botafogo there is the Botanic Garden, with its splendid avenue of royalpalms, a hundredfeet high ; you willremember the fineengraving of thisavenue, in M book. Be-sides the palm -avenue, there areshady walks, andgroves of tropicaltrees, and greenlawns, such as yourarely find at a fine afternoon,the garden is full ofll pleasure-seekers ; it_i is easy of access,since the Botafogo Beer-Garden. railroad companyextended its line to this place, seven miles from the come out to enjoy the ride in the open cars, as wellas to visit the garden ; I doubt if any other street-railroadin the world passes by such a succession of lovely scenes. In the city there is a museum of natural history, rathershowy than good; the collections are badly labelled, and. SOCIAL LIFE AT RIO. 479 badly arranged. But for another institution I have onlypraise : the National Library, with one hundred and twentythousand printed volumes, and a vast store of valuable manu-scripts ; such a library as any city in the United States wouldbe proud of. It is open to the public, day and evening, andthe reading-room is almost always occupied by students orgeneral knowledge-seekers. The Director—a kindly, scholarly gentleman, you may besure—takes pains to show us many of the old Jesuit manu-scripts ; the library has numbers of these, relics of the ex-tinct monasteries and mission-houses. So we bury ourselvesin them, and get to dreaming of those strange, hard-working,self-sacrificing fanatics—the most wonderful human machines,probably, that the world ever saw, and the most unselfishChristian heroes. What a deal of romance there is in earlyBrazilian history ! But away from the dusty, yellow manuscripts, away fromleaden air an
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectbrazild, bookyear1879
