terraces and verandahs adorned with elegant trellis-work and
flowers, as there are in other warm countries. Ugly little
balconies hang from the walls, while clumsy wooden shutters close up
the windows, and prevent the smallest sunbeam from penetrating into
the rooms, where everything is enveloped in almost perfect darkness.
This, however, is a matter of the greatest indifference to the
Brazilian ladies, who certainly never over-fatigue themselves with
reading or working.

The town offers, therefore, very little in the way of squares,
streets, and buildings, which, for a stranger, can prove in the
least attractive; while the people that he meets are truly shocking--
nearly all being negroes and negresses, with flat, ugly noses,
thick lips, and short woolly hair. They are, too, generally half
naked, with only a few miserable rags on their backs, or else they
are thrust into the worn-out European-cut clothes of their masters.
To every four or five blacks may be reckoned a mulatto, and it is
only here and there that a white man is to be seen.

This horrible picture is rendered still more revolting by the
frequent bodily infirmities which everywhere meet the eye: among
these elephantiasis, causing horrible club-feet, is especially
conspicuous; there is, too, no scarcity of persons afflicted with
blindness and other ills. Even the cats and dogs, that run about
the gutters in great numbers, partake of the universal ugliness:
most of them are covered with the mange, or are full of wounds and
sores. I should like to be endowed with the magic power of
transporting hither every traveller who starts back with affright
from the lanes of Constantinople, and asserts that the sight of the
interior of this city destroys the effect produced by it when viewed