"It will take a lot of bad smells to blot the memory of _that_," he
said.

They came to the bad smells in about an hour and a quarter. An hour
later they left the custom-house. Then, each in a rocketing tilbury,
driven by a yelling Jehu, they shot through the narrow and filthy
streets of the Rio of that far day and drew up, still trembling with
fright, at the doors of the Hotel dos Estrangeiros.

"You got here, too!" cried Leighton as Lewis tumbled out of his cab. "We
had both wheels on the ground at once three separate times. How about
you?"

"I really don't know anything about what happened, sir," said Lewis,
grinning. "I was holding on."

"What were they yelling? Did you make anything out of that?" asked
Leighton, when they had surveyed their rooms and were washing.

"They were shouting at the people in the way," said Lewis. "My driver
yelled only two things. When a colored person was in the way, it was,
'Melt chocolate-drop!' and when he shouted at a white man, it was:
'Clear the way to hell! a foreigner rides with me.'"

"Boy," said Leighton, speaking through several folds of towel and the
open connecting-door, "if you ever find your brains running to seed, get
a job as a cabman. There's something about a cab, the world over, that
breeds wit."