From Fortaleza what was originally called the “Estrada de Ferro de Baturité,” but which had recently changed its nationality and become the “Brazil North Eastern Railways, Ltd.,” runs far into the interior of the state. A journey to the end of the line and return, however, takes from Thursday morning to Sunday night, and I did not dream I could absent myself so long until I discovered the unimportance of Maranguape. This nearest important town of the interior was a mere eighteen miles away, and as ten days must be passed between steamers, it seemed the best place to spend our evenings after Fortaleza had had its fill of the Kinetophone. There was more green along the way than the constant cry of “secca medonha” (horrible drought) had led us to expect, but it was largely in trees and bushes, with grass almost wholly lacking. Beside the track lay scattered expensive iron pipes from abroad that were some day to bring sufficient water to the capital, if they did not rust away first. These, we learned, represented another of Brazil’s government scandals. State officials had been given a hundred and fifty thousand contos ($50,000,000) by recent legislation with which to bring Fortaleza a suitable water supply. They found it necessary to spend a year or more in Europe before finally ordering pipe specially cast, with the name “Ceará” embossed on each length of it. When thousands of these had been tossed upon the beach at the capital and scattered for fifty miles or more along the railroad, the politicians reported that the money had given out, and Fortaleza continues to drink such water as it can dig out of its own sand-holes by hand or by windmill.

An hour out we began to draw near the clusters of hills we had seen from the sea. A little branch line circled the base of them and at length brought us to Maranguape, spread a bit up the lower skirts of the range. It proved to be a sleepy village, fairly large, for it lay scattered for long distances in both directions, but of that grass-grown temperament which promised little reward for our efforts. The promise was only too exactly fulfilled. The sound of shod footsteps was so rare in Maranguape that everyone hurried to the doors whenever we passed, leaving behind us a long trail of motionless, open-mouthed faces, and we were surrounded and hemmed in by curious ragamuffins and innumerable children—the one unfailing crop of Ceará, wet or dry—until we were forced to use violence to get room to move; yet few families had energy enough to come across the street to see what was unquestionably the greatest novelty, if not the best show, that had ever come to Maranguape. Even while our performance was at its height, however, the town remained squatted in family groups before its doors, cracking the same aged jokes, exchanging the same petty, malicious gossip, indulging in the same banal pseudo-courtesies as their great-grandfathers did and as their great-grandchildren probably will. One fellow to whom, curious to get the local point of view, I put a question, replied, “Eu quero primeiro ouvir o bicho roncar—I want to hear the beast snore first; then if it is good I’ll come to-morrow.” It was hard to believe that Maranguape was the birthplace even of Rodolpho Theophilo, a pharmacist who has written several readable, if amateurish, novels on life in drought-stricken Ceará. Our total receipts that evening amounted, at the current exchange, to seventeen dollars!

There was reported to be a hotel by a waterfall half an hour’s walk up the hillside. “Tut,” Carlos and Vinhães trudged there after our miniature audience had been hustled out, but I preferred to stay near the railway station. There was not even a restaurant in the town proper, and I could only get a lump of stale bread in one shop, an ancient can of American sardines in another, and wash them down with “cajú wine,” a concoction which the seller assured me was “magnificent,” but which outdid the strongest medicine I had ever taken. I swung my hammock in the cinema, the manager having induced the owner to permit me to open one barred window to save me from drowning in my own perspiration, and brought a moringa of water to save me from death by thirst.

Dawn found me on my way back to the main line to catch the weekly train to the end of it. A narrow-shouldered locomotive dragged the four freight and six passenger cars made in Delaware away from the little heap of hills into what might best be called a jungle, though there were few large trees and no really dense vegetation. The leaves were everywhere shriveled or curled together, as if striving to protect from the malignant sun their last suggestion of moisture. The dry air was so clear that the arch of heaven seemed higher and the horizon more vast than I had ever known them before, and the light falling from this greater height of cloudless sky struck the ground with doubly blinding clarity and seemed to spray out in all directions, like falling water. A few stagnant puddles in the depressions of the land were all that remained of the long-forgotten rains. Of vegetation the most striking, and at the same time the most numerous, were the carnauba palms for which Ceará is famous. The carnauba is much smaller than the royal palm, of girlish slenderness, its leaves, shaped like those of our palm-leaf fans, arranged in symmetrical sphere shape as carefully as the netted hair of a modest young lady. There is nothing of the careless, lop-shouldered cocoanut nor of the haughty majesty of the palma imperial about the carnauba; rather is it chic and dainty. The royal palm is a regal lady always proudly garbed in rich plumes, but of no great worth, except ornamentally. The cocoanut palm is a slouchy, disheveled wench given to hanging about negro huts and tropical beaches, producing only water and a bit of copra, sufficient to save herself from destruction. The carnauba, on the other hand, is not only a modest and pretty, but a very useful, young lady, who stays at home and attends to business, no matter what the provocation to go down to the beach and play with the sea breezes. She is as typical of the Cearense landscape as the parasol pine-tree is of the southernmost states of Brazil.

The carnauba is useful from crown to toe; like a certain animal familiar to our stockyards, nothing but its murmur is devoid of utility. Among other things, it was of fibers and wax from the carnauba that were made the first phonograph records and some of the first electric light filaments. This wax is one of the important exports of the state and of its railroad. The leaves are taken inside a closed hut and threshed until the wax falls in white powder, which is then swept up and reaches us in many forms, from seals to shoe-polish. From it the natives make their candles, almost the only form of light used in the interior. Exported in more ambitious quantity, the wax alone would enrich and occupy half the people of Ceará. From the roots of the carnauba is made a purgative, and a kind of farinha of inestimable value in times of famine. The leaves are woven into hats, mats, baskets, brooms, and the roofs of houses; from them comes the palm-leaf fan with which we are familiar. Fibers useful for many purposes are taken from the inside of the trunk, the iron-hard wood of which serves many purposes, ranging from musical instruments to water-pipes. The pulp of the fruit has an agreeable taste, as does the seed, after being roasted. From the latter comes a saccharine substance similar to sago. When small it serves as food, and it may be turned into wine or vinegar. Lastly, the seeds are used as birros, knobs to which native lace-makers tie the ends of their threads, and the clickity-click of these may be heard all over northern Brazil.

Unfortunately the drought was beginning to choke even this paragon of usefulness, and some of the lower leaves had turned sear and brown, breaking the perfect symmetry of the sphere. Sometimes the only representative of plant life that survives the seccas is the joazeiro, a dense-green, haystack-shaped tree, the leaves and branches of which are cut and fed to cattle as a last resort. The leaves of this tree fall, still green, in September, and new ones immediately take their place. There is another tree of Ceará that furnishes a natural soap, but its oily stench is so offensive that until some means is found of neutralizing this, only the poorest people will use it.

The manager of the Ceará railway was an English F.R.G.S. who had not lost his energy during long tropical residence, and we made good Brazilian time in spite of a heavy train and the war-time necessity of making steam of wood rather than coal. A few isolated houses were scattered up the low, thick-wooded ridges, and towns were almost frequent. Torrid as it was under the unclouded sun, the more pretentious natives wore clothing as dark and heavy as we of the North in April or October. Coffee was available at every station, but little else could be had, sometimes mangos and oranges, or hot milk served at scandalous prices by old women little less distressing in appearance than the beggars. There was a constant procession at every station of lame, halt, blind, and especially the unwashed, rubbing their unsoaped hands along the window-sills and imploring “a charity, for the love of God and our Lady Mary and by the saints in Heaven!” Others of these unfortunates marched through the aisles of the cars, so that one was beset on all sides by offensive caressing hands. Those who, for some reason, could not reach us, were almost as annoying with their “Psio!” as Brazilians spell their ubiquitous hiss to attract attention. How weary one grows of this short, shrill, nerve-startling “Psio!” here and “Psio!” there, everywhere, all day long and far into the night, up and down the whole country!

Baturité, once terminus of the line to which it gave its name, is a town of some size, sitting placidly among low foothills. Some of these small isolated ranges are high enough to snatch a little moisture from the passing trade winds and turban themselves in clouds that gave them a mantle of green, but such slight patches were of little use to the thirsty state as a whole. All the region, both rolling plains and hills, had a soft velvety-brown color, everywhere besprinkled with stocky joazeiro trees. Many of these were already being cropped to feed the starving cattle. Here and there smaller trees of deep-striking roots had retained their color, but most of the vegetation was bare and leafless as our own in midwinter, the landscape growing more and more oppressive as we proceeded inland. Early in the afternoon rugged granite hills began to break the horizon until, at Quixadá, there were great rows of them. Solid masses of granite heaped up into big hills stood in soldierly formation for miles along the track, like a guard of honor, magnificent heaps sufficient to build all the edifices the world could need for a century.

Quixadá means in the aboriginal Tupi “lean cow,” and there were a few such animals there to bear out the appellation. A mule-car staggered away to somewhere up in the rock hills. Granite, piled in fantastic ridges and forming most striking sky-lines, followed us for a long distance. Everywhere was dead-bare ground, without even a sprig of grass, and the air was so devoid of moisture that it dried up the nostrils, so clear that one could see plainly the slightest markings on the granite heaps far away on the otherwise flat horizon and marvel that the train took so incredibly long to reach them. We rumbled frequently over bone-dry creeks and rivulets; once we crossed a huge four-span iron bridge over a river not only without water but even without moisture. Yet if the Cearenses lack rivers in times of drought, it is probably because they let them all flow madly away to the sea after the rains, instead of damming them up and using the water for irrigation. All day there was scarcely a sign of cultivation, and very few cattle or even skeletons of them. No doubt they were farther back among the hills, where mud-holes still existed. A cotton tree of moderate size seemed to grow wild, but it, too, had succumbed to the general fate and we ground monotonously on through a sun-flooded landscape of bare bushes not unlike the chaparral of Texas.

Quixeramobim bore slight resemblance to its aboriginal meaning of “fat cow,” and the land beyond was still more dreary. Exclamations of “secca medonha!” rose within the car whenever we passed a family—men, women and children, gaunt, ragged, sun-bleached and jungle-travel-worn—tramping north with all their miserable possessions, consisting mostly of blackened pots and pans on their heads. They were off after water, of course, since their own mud-hole had dried up, and might be forced to tramp all the way to the coast, or even go on to the Amazon, before they could again find means of grubbing out a livelihood. Long stretches of country as deadly as an elderly rattlesnake exhausted our weary eyes, and the train, as if it, too, were worn out by twelve hours of this dreary monotony, at length halted for the night in Senador Pompeu.

We were at once mobbed by a throng of self-styled hotel-keepers and baggage-carrying ragamuffins, and I was soon imprisoned in an interior room without ceiling in which there was not even a bed, but only three hammocks hanging listlessly from hooks in the mud walls. I threw these outside and put up my own, then set out for a stroll. The Southern Cross and Great Dipper were exactly at the same height. The surrounding landscape consisted chiefly of dried-up cotton bushes, and the trade wind howled across it as if we were still on the seacoast, instead of nearly two hundred miles inland. A night-school of ragged urchins was in full swing in one of the mud huts, but it was run much like a crap game. Here everyone, from hotel proprietor to street gamins, called me “doctor,” possibly because I still wore the resemblance to a white collar. What a mongrel race they were! If one were picking a team of men, they would be harder to match in color than horses. Nor was there any connection between color and social position. A ragged blond farmer might be seen cringing and baring his head before a pompous black politician—though for the most part negroes were scarce and lowly. Around a long, loose-jointed, wooden table my fellow-passengers wolfed the never-varying Brazilian meal as only Brazilians can, shoveling it up in great knifefuls and racing away to begin an all-night uproar of gambling and prattle.

It would not feel natural to go on a railway journey in Brazil without getting up in the middle of the night to catch a five o’clock train. When we rumbled away it was still pitch dark, and as the old kerosene lamp in the car blew out I fell asleep again. From daylight on there were many piles of wood for the engines along the way, and the white bones of cattle lay scattered through the brown brush. Here and there a few rib-racked animals were eating leaves. Men in brown leather hats, each twisted and warped by sun, rain, wind, and individual use into a distinctive shape, appeared at the rare stations. The flat land grew almost swampy, with now and then a hint of green, and at 10:30, with only a scattering of passengers left, we drew up at Iguatú, 265 miles from the coast, and the end of the line. Iguatú is completely beyond the land of beds. The room I got in a sort of miniature caravansary was furnished with two hooks, and nothing more. To these I managed to add a table and chair, with a moringa of what passed for drinking-water; and there was a shower-bath available whenever one could coax a man to lug a can of water up a ladder and fill another, perforated and suspended from the roof. Midday was no time to stroll in such a climate. I swung my hammock and fell to reading by the light of a glassless window that looked out upon a white-hot world in which the sheer sunshine fell like molten iron on every unsheltered thing.

I was back again below the sixth parallel of longitude, for to go inland from the capital of Ceará means journeying south rather than west. The town was flat, with the usual sandy praça, a windmill in its center, and tile-roofed mud huts scattered in every direction. One really could not feel much sympathy for a people who depend for water, for life itself, on a few mud-holes that may dry up at any time. Clothing is considered merely an adornment in Iguatú, and children in sun-proof hides were playing everywhere in the sand. The people prided themselves on being caboclos, or native Brazilians for generations back, and though there were a few blonds scattered among them, the great majority were of part Indian blood, with negro mixtures, but no full-blooded Africans. The treacherous, surly cabra, as the Brazilian calls the cross between Indian and negro, when none of that class is listening, was in considerable evidence. There was a childlike simplicity about the inhabitants which recalled those of Diamantina, though here the preponderance of Indian blood made the general indifference a matter of fatalism rather than racial cheerfulness. Many of the inhabitants had an indistinct notion that England, London, Europe, and New York were all different names for the same place—a place in which was being waged the great war of which they had heard rumors. One man asked me in great earnestness whether it was true, as some visitor had once asserted without winning credence, that “there are places in the world where it is so cold you have to wear garments on your hands,” In this region patriotism is a matter of separate mud-holes. A makeshift waiter to whom I was attempting to make some kindly remark about Iguatú interrupted me with, “Eu não son filho d’aqui, não, s’nho’—I am not a son of here but of ——,” naming some other mud town identical with this one but which to him was as Rome is to Oshkosh.

There were many picturesque countrymen about the market-place. Goat-skins and cowhides are the most important commerce here, especially with the drought killing great numbers of cattle, and caboclos, burned a velvety brown by the blazing sunshine, rode in with a few sun-dried cowhides and sold them for what the merchants chose to give, which seemed to be three vintems a kilogram, or less than a cent a pound. Every possible thing is made of leather in this land where starving cattle make it so plentiful—ropes, boxes, curtains, hats, even clothing. Nearly all the men wore hats some two feet in diameter, most of them made of leather, the cheaper ones merely of cowhide, which twists into uncouth shapes with long exposure to the elements, the better ones of sheep- or deer-skin. The others were woven from the carnauba leaf, looking much like the coarsest of our farmers’ straw hats.

I had concluded to buy the largest hat to be found in the shops when I caught sight of an unusually fine one on the head of a powerful and handsome young native in the crowd that was watching me from the street. When I had overcome the mixture of pride and bashfulness in which nearly all caboclos wrap themselves, I learned that his name was João Barboso de Lera, and that the hat had been made to his special order by an old woman expert living some ten miles away. It was most elaborately decorated, and it was evident that its possession raised the wearer high above the rank and file of his fellow-townsmen. His hat is to the youthful Cearense of the interior what spats and silk cravats are to the urban Latin-American. João, however, may have been in financial straits, for when I hinted in a mild and easily repudiated voice my willingness to buy his head-gear, he astonished me by accepting at once. It had cost him twelve milreis and was almost new; he thought ten would now be a fair price for it. I concealed my delight as we walked together to my lodging, where João deposited the hat on my table, crumpled up in his hand the bill I handed him, and wishing me, with a friendly but diffident smile, a joyful future, strode away bareheaded through the gruelling sunshine.

Later I learned that he was a valoroso, almost a bandit, who had “shot up” a neighboring town only a few days before and had several assassinations to his discredit. The hat is of cowhide, covered with fancifully patterned sheepskin, weighs almost two pounds and measures two feet from tip to tip, though the crown is little larger than a skull-cap. How the natives endure these under a cloudless tropical sun is beyond northern conception, but the Cearense countryman considers them the only adequate protection. Whole suits of leather are also worn in this region, tight trousers for riding, a short coat, and a sort of apron from neck to crotch in lieu of waistcoat, the whole ordinarily costing less than ten dollars. Whether or not the wearer overtaken by rain, followed by another space of the blazing sun, is removed from this garb by a taxidermist is another of the unsolved mysteries of the picturesque state of Ceará.

At Iguatú tobacco was sold in black rolls as large as a ship’s hawser, being wound round a stick in ropes thirty or forty yards long and sewed up in leather for muleback transportation. A kind of sedan chair on a mule, with canvas or leather curtains and fitted inside with cushions and all the comforts of home, is still used by the few wealthier women obliged to travel. The railway goes on quite a distance into the interior, but though there was a big two-span iron bridge near town across a mud gully that might be a river, traffic has been abandoned beyond Iguatú. The track southward was wrinkled and twisted out of all possible use as a railroad, and great heaps of rails which the company had hoped some day to lay all the way to the frontier of the state, and perhaps beyond, were rapidly rusting away in the ruthless climate.

The chief cause of this railway stagnation was Padre Cicero and his cangaceiros. Father Cicero is one of the chief celebrities of Brazil, his name being known from the Uruguayan to the Venezuelan boundaries. Thirty-two leagues beyond Iguatú is the town of Crato, of some importance industrially, and three leagues east of this lies Joazeiro, said to have more inhabitants than Fortaleza, though they are nearly all fanatical followers of their local saint, living in mud huts and all more or less of African blood. Here Padre Cicero, a saint in the purely Catholic sense of the word, reigns supreme. He is an old man, past his three score and ten, a native of Crato, who took orders in the seminary of Bahia and became parish priest of Joazeiro. The conviction of some woman that he had cured her of an ailment by miracle gave him the by no means original idea of establishing a shrine with a “miraculous Virgin.” Credulous fools were not lacking, and Joazeiro soon became the most famous place of pilgrimage in North Brazil, at least among the lower classes. Three large churches were built, and so persistently did people flock thither and settle down within immediate reach of miraculous assistance that Padre Cicero soon became too powerful to be handled by the state government. His picture occupies the saint’s place in all the country houses of the region, and he was said to have more than ten thousand followers, variously called cangaceiros and jagunços, whom he could use either as workmen or as a sort of outlaw force to impress his will upon the region. The trade winds which dry up the northern part of the state begin to drop their moisture in the vicinity of Crato and Joazeiro, making them green and fertile and giving the outlaw priest an added advantage. Several expeditions have been sent against him and he has been a prisoner in Fortaleza, Rio, and Rome, but always returns to power. Suspended by the Church, he is said to live up to the papal order by merely confessing and baptizing, without saying mass or otherwise conducting himself as a full-fledged priest. Those of a friendly turn of mind toward him assert that Father Cicero is a “good and pious man, a strict Catholic, who is doing his duty as he sees it and who has no other fault than too great a liking for money.”

There is always talk of this or that part of Brazil seceding; Ceará has already partly done so, thanks to the power of Padre Cicero. He is really the ruler of an autonomous state, from whom even the delegado and other government officials take their orders. For years the roads of southern Ceará have been unsafe, for his followers have robbed and killed with impunity, torturing and mutilating natives who oppose or give evidence against them, levying on political opponents, the rich, and merchants, though they have seldom ventured to trouble foreigners. They call themselves “romeiros” (pilgrims or crusaders), and the federal government has no more been able to conquer them than to put down the quarrel between the States of Paraná and Santa Catharina. Padre Cicero deposed the president of Ceará, and when a regiment of federal troops was sent to put down his “jagunços” they were treated as brothers by the fanatics and threw their weight against the state authorities. Like Rio and Nictheroy, the state was declared in a state of siege by “Dudú,” but those who know their way about the political labyrinth of Brazil claim that the soldiers ostensibly sent to put down the bandits—and who did more robbing and killing than the outlaws they came to suppress—had secret orders from the national boss, the “odious gaucho,” to aid the cause of the priestly despot. However that may be, Padre Cicero continues in full command of the region, all commerce of which is in his hands. He has surrounded Joazeiro with a high granite wall and smuggled in overland from Santos quantities of arms and ammunition, among them several cannon. He is notorious among Brazilian priests for his reputation of living up to his vows of chastity, though the rumor persists that this is due to physical drawbacks which have finally developed into his present mania for power and wealth. Old and feeble now, he had an Italian secretary and a complete staff, including a treasurer, and was said to do nothing but play saint and strengthen the belief of his followers that upon his death he will immediately appear among them again in another form. This last would seem to be a golden opportunity for an experienced actor with the proper qualifications and ample courage.

The entire ragged, leather-hatted town of Iguatú was down to see us off the next noon, wriggling the fingers of a crooked hand in friendly farewell, as is the Brazilian fashion. They are a simple, good-hearted, superstitious people, looking outwardly like fierce bandits, yet really childlike in their harmlessness, unless they are led astray by fanaticism or designing superiors. We had to struggle for seats because the thirty-four country people whom the government was assisting to go to the rubber-fields of the Amazon, rather than have them die at home of the drought, overflowed from the second-class car into the first. Many of these were pure white under their tan, but a more animal-like lot of human beings could scarcely be found in an ostensibly civilized country. Ragged, dirty, sun-scorched, prematurely aged by the rough life-struggle with their ungenerous soil and climate, their personal habits were as frankly natural and un-selfconscious as those of the four-footed animals. Children, ranging from the just-born to the already demoralized, rolled about the car floor, while men and women alike constantly passed from mouth to mouth bottles of miserable native cachaza and crude pipes, both sexes generously decorating the floor with their expectoration—a rare thing in South America. All this would have been more nearly endurable had they had any notion of their own drawbacks, but they were as convinced of their own equality, if not superiority, as are most untutored people—a semi-wild tribe lacking the virtues of real savages.

Everywhere the talk was of rain, to the Cearense the most important phenomenon of nature. Even the women knew cloud possibilities and studied the horizon constantly for signs of storm. They ended their more forceful sentences not with “if God wishes,” but “se chover—if it rains.” A man bound for the Amazon was holding one of the many babies when it played upon him that practical joke for which babies of all races and social standings are noted. “Menina!” he cried, “Parece que a secca não ‘sta’ tão grande aqui, não!—Girl! It looks as if the drought were not so great here, eh!”

In fact, the drought was broken that very night. We had halted again at Senador Pompeu—where the sertanejos refused to pay more than a milreis each for hotel accommodations and slept out in consequence—and I had at last fallen asleep in spite of the incessant rumpus of my fellow-guests when I was awakened by a heavy downpour. With daylight the domes and sugar-loaves and heaps of granite hills among which the train picked its way stood forth ghost-like through a blue rainy-season air with an appearance quite different from that under a blazing sun. Heavy showers continued throughout the day, and as the last rain had fallen ten months before, joy was freely manifesting itself. Everywhere people were congratulating one another, showing perfect contentment whether they were forced to keep under shelter or to wade about in the downpour, talking of nothing but the rain, the sound of which on his roof is to the Cearense the sweetest of music. It was remarkable how nature, too, responded to the change. I could not have chosen a better four days in which to make the trip to Iguatú, for these had given me both the drought and the resurrection. The whole region, dry, brown, and shriveled three days before, was already a sea of bright green. Leaves opened up overnight as they do only in a month or six weeks in the temperate zone, giving the effect of seeing midwinter followed by late spring in a single day, a jungle magic reminding one of the Hindu tricksters who seem to make plants grow in an hour from seed to bloom before the eyes. Rivers bone-dry on Thursday were considerable streams on Sunday, with natives wading like happy children in water where they had shuffled the day before in dry sand. No wonder these poor, misguided people of the jungle lose heart when their world dries up, and become suddenly like another race when the clouds again come to their rescue.

All day long joyful cries of “Eil-a chuva!” (There’s the rain!) sounded whenever a new shower burst upon us. Life at best is rigorous in this climate, under the life-giving but sometimes death-dealing sun, and only the hardy or the helpless would have remained here to endure it. No wonder the Cearense who can by hook or crook do so becomes a lawyer without idealism or a shopkeeper without human pity. The aspect of nature changed so magically that it was hard to judge what this light, half-sandy soil might be able to do under proper rainfall or irrigation, so that my first conclusion that northeastern Brazil was doomed to remain a thinly populated semi-desert may have been too hasty. Between showers the breeze gently moved the fans of the palm-trees, the graúnas, or singing blackbirds of North Brazil, flitting in and out among the carnaubas. At Baturité all the Amazon-bound travelers old enough to own a few coppers bought mangos and quickly made the car look like a bathroom by their furious attacks on a fruit that has been fitly described by a disappointed tourist as tasting “like a paint-brush soaked in turpentine.” As the negro blood and light sand marking the coast strip announced our approach to Fortaleza, I turned to the brakeman on the back platform with a fervent, “Well, we are getting back where we can sleep in beds again.” He gazed at me with a puzzled-astonished air that caused me to put a question. I had forgotten the native Cearense’s devotion to the hammock; the brakeman had slept in a bed once in his life—when he had a broken leg.

I had installed myself again in the “Pensão Bitú” and was just starting for the theater when I was held up by another downpour. When I finally entered the “Cinema Rio Branco” I found it almost empty; but it would scarcely have been fair to curse the first rain that had troubled us since early January in Victoria, especially one which meant almost the difference between life and death to thousands of our fellow-men. We had done poor business during my absence, due mainly to the fact that the ten-day engagement forced upon us by the steamer schedule was too long for Ceará. At Maranguape my three companions had lived in an old hammock-hotel up in the hills where a natural spring furnished splendid swimming, and where there was no charge for rooms, but merely for meals. On Friday the performance was a “Benefit for the Santa Casa de Misericordia,” or nun’s hospital, for which I had sold our part of the show at 300$ to Vinhães, who in his turn had contracted with the nuns to furnish everything for 500$. But when it was all over the religious ladies had refused to pay, so that in the end Vinhães was the loser. I relieved “Tut” by running the second session myself to a handful of people, while the rain drumming on our sheet-iron roof all but drowned out the phonograph, and pocketed one eleventh as much as I had the Sunday before in this gamble known as the show business.

My last duties in Ceará were mainly of a personal nature, for to Vinhães fell the task of buying the tickets and getting the outfit on board. The Brasil arrived about noon and we were down at the wharf by two, only to have our leisurely boatmen nearly cause us to miss the steamer and squat in the sand another ten days. The whistle had long since blown and the sailing-hour was well past before we even started out from the wharf. Then we lost our rudder, which was rescued by a negro rower who sprang overboard and was washed up on the beach with it, while the heavy boat with all our possessions, not to mention the four of us, threatened at any moment to capsize. There followed a long struggle between time and white-capped swells, with the lazy negro oarsmen as referees, and we were off at the very moment that the last of our trunks went into the hold.