LIFE IN BRAZIL.

[The following interesting letter corroborates so fully the details of our recent articles ou slavery in Brazil, and in other respects gives so striking a picture of the state of society there, that it cannot but be interesting to our readers.] "Rancho, near Os Perus, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1863.

" My DEAR --,--I am now about to make a tardy performance of my promise to give you some account of my experiences in Brazil. The climate of the province of Sao Paulo, generally from April to November, is really magnificent; it surpasses in grandeur and beauty anything that can be imagined by one who has never been out of England. But from November to April, excepting in such unusually dry seasons as the present, and in the vicinity of the mountain ranges at almost all times, the rain is terrific. In the hot season it comes on pretty regularly about the middle of the day, and continues till the middle of the night. I have sometimes had to walk two or three miles in a stream of water over my ankles—the bed of the stream being the road– or track which goes by the name of a road. At other times I have seen it rain for a whole week, without any cessation, and portions of that time in torrents which I have no skill to describe. During the interval, in the months of December, January, and February, the heat is very great. Iron left stationary in the sun's rays for a few minutes will burn the bands on being touched. This I have frequently found to my cost, when suddenly laying hold of instruments of that material. Insects the most difficult to kill are speedily burnt to death when placed on a hund-bill that has been thus heated. I was living in a canvass tent during nine or ten months, which included the

whole of the wet season last year. In January my tent was pitched in a shady place in a wood, and although the sun's rays could never penetrate the foliage sufficiently to fall directly on the tent, a thermometer in the inside reached 110 deg. Fakir., but I do not think that fairly in the shade it ever marked more than 93 deg. The interior of the tent in the middle of the day was from 15 to 20 deg. hotter than the exterior. This intense heat was alternated with rain, such as I have partially described above.

" Notwithstanding all the contrivances and appliances that I could invent, the rain, after ten or twelve hours' duration, copi- ously penetrated the tent, and I have more than once been for a whole week without a single article in the tent that was not more or less saturated, bed-clothing and everything I bad. When I add to this, that from the roads being impassable I bad difficulty in obtaining anything to eat, and have sometimes sub- sisted for days on beans, a little pork-fat, and tincture of quinine, and that while at work I was in constant danger of being bitten by the most poisonous snakes known, you will perceive that a railway engineer in Brazil has other than plea- sant things to encounter.

"In the wet season the roads are execrable in the extreme. I have seen portions of two hundred yards long which could be compared only to the bed of a river, in which the mud was thick and deep, and in one of those places I have counted the heads of more than twenty dead mules projecting above the mud. Goods are transported either on the backs of mules or on bullock-carts, and cannot be conveyed by any other means. The bullock-cart consists of a platform, pole, and axle, mounted on two solid wheels. Its form appears to have undergone no change since the time of the Romans, and is exactly similar to that of some vehicles of the same description which I saw in Portugal. The drivers obdurately refuse to grease the wheels, and the result is that they make a noise which can sometimes be heard at dis- tances of more than a mile. During two or three months of the year the roads become impassable even for these barbarously rude vehicles, excepting in the immediate vicinity of the towns. I have sometimes seen thousands of mules intercepted by a bad place in the road, and compelled to remain stationary for days. Mules are the only means by which the produce of the interior is conveyed to the sea-coast. They are sent from the interior— laden principally with coffee—in troops varying in number from twenty to a hundred ; a troop travels in separate divisions of ten or twelve, each division in the care of two men, or a man and a boy, who are called troupeiras ' (pronounced trouptira). A troupeira's costume in the hot weather generally consists solely of a pair of trousers and a brad-brimmed hat. Each man has with him, however, a thick cloth cloak, called a poncho, which serves for a blanket at night and for a protection from the rain in the day. Judging of the rustic population of the interior from those of these men who are not negroes, and from other speci- mens that not unfrequently present themselves, and comparing them with other classes, and with all the inhabitants of the town districts, it appears to me that if anything great will ever be made of the present materials of population of this part of Brazil, it must have its source in the class from which the troupeiras are drawn, and in that class only. Scarcely any individuals of this class can read. They are ignorant in the extreme ; uncultivated and ferocious; barbarous in the severest sense of the word,- yet they are punctilious in observing a certain conventional polite- ness among themselves which contrasts strangely with their general bearing. But they have a due share of that sturdy vigour which is necessary for the preservation of a race, the absence of which in the other classes makes them more insipid to Englishmen than it is easy to describe.

"Avery large proportion of the population is made up of negroes and mulattoes, most of whom are slaves. For the short time I have been in Brazil I have bad considerable experience of the habits and characters of these people, and I have become con- vinced that their presence is the greatest bane of the country. Whether the case of other States may be similar or not, as far as Brazil is concerned it is an egregious error to suppose that the curse of slavery falls on the negroes. A few of the masters are certainly inhuman and brutal in their treatment of the slaves ; but this is by no means generally the case, and I do not see how it can possibly be doubted that, on the whole, the blacks are very much better off than they would be even in this country, under any institutions of their own. The deleterious influence which the coloured population exercises on the nation is, however, enormous. Perhaps the worst evil is the mixture of blood and consequent degeneracy of the inhabitants. This it is impossible to prevent while the two races are living side by side. In this country—being, as it is, a slaveholdiug and a Wave-trafficking one—the evil is carried to an almost in- credible extent. Nearly all the population is more or less tainted with black blood. A large proportion of the land is held by mulattoes of the first generation, and there are instances of negro slaves being themselves slaveholders. Another evil almost as great is one which is constantly being adduced, but which must, nevertheless, be seen in action in order to be appre- ciated. It consists of the indolent habits and contempt of labour which the peculiar institution' engenders in the white popula- tion. There is an entire absence of either energy or skill in the cultivation of th3 land. Except in the coffee plantations the land can scarcely be said to be cultivated at all. The mode adopted is as follows: f--Fire is put to the wood on a tract of ground when the high grass and brushwood are very dry. By this means the ground is cleared of the undergrowth, and most of the trees are thrown down; but the charred stems of those whose diameter exceeds five or six inches remain on the ground. The small roots are then extracted and burnt, the surface of the ground is turned up with hoes and Indian corn is planted ; but the charred timber and stems remain until they rot. The Indian corn takes about half a year from the planting to its arrival at maturity. It is then harvested, and the ground is planted with sugar-cane, which occupies the soil about fourteen months, and is succeeded by mandioca (a plant of the same family as arrowroot), from whose roots a kind of flour is made. Dwarf French beans are planted simultaneously with the mandioca, and are harvested before the latter plant has grown to any considerable size. This course is continued for five or six years. The land has then become exhausted, and is permitted to run to waste for a number of years. It is almost immediately covered with wood and rank weeds, and when it is again required for cultivation an exactly similar process of reclaiming has to be gone through ;

manure is never applied. Feijaiis' (pronounced fazhdngs 1), i. e., the seed of French beans, flour made from the mandioca root, a little rice, and pork-fat, form the staple and almost the only food of the general inhabitants of the country. Meat is rarely eaten except in the towns. There one can buy very bad beef at 3d. per pound, worse mutton at Is., and fowls at about 2s. Od. each. In my district fowls, very poor ones, are sometimes plentiful at a shilling each, and eggs at id. ; at other• times I have sent eight or nine miles without being able to procure either. Seventy miles further in the interior, however•, provisions are very much cheaper. Fowls are there sold at 3d. each and eggs at U. per• dozen. Wheat is unknown in Brazil, or at least in this part of it. A few years ago the Government procured a great quantity of seed from England and distributed it in presents among the farmers ; but, according to report, they without ex- ception ate the seed instead of sowing it. Wheaten bread can be obtained in the towns, but it is all made from North American flour.

" There are slaves of all ages and both sexes in every fazenda- hideousaud disgusting looking animals they are—particularly the women ; no picture or• description could convey even a faint idea of their wretched appearance. The women's dress consists solely of a comae linen jacket and a linsey-woolsey skirt, which is tied round the waist, and extends to the calf of the leg. Imagine them, if you can, as I have often seen them, coming home at night in torrents of rain, thoroughly drenched and covered with mud, each woman with a bundle of wood on her head and a pipe in her mouth, toiling up a steep bill in a muddy lane, so slippery that a firm footing could scarcely be obtained at all ! The men have a jacket and pair of trousers, and sometimes a shirt. The children have a short linen frock, but in the hot weather• they go perfectly naked, the girls till they are seven or eight years old, and the boys till they are nine or ten. Where negro slavery exists, flogging is a matter of necessity, as the negroes ar•e amenable to no other kind of punishment that would not injure their constitutions. It often takes place in these fazendas. In some of them the dress is not usually removed on such occasions, but generally the men are scourged on their bare backs, and the women have their skirts turned up and fastened round their waists and are flogged behind. The scourge is made of a piece of raw cow-hide, five or six feet long, and about two inches broad, fastened to a stick, which serves for a handle.

" The following incident may, perhaps, give you a little idea of the country life of even the upper classes of Brazilian society :— " The Marqueza de — is reputed to be the richest woman in Brazil, certainly she has been the most influential. She was the Duchess of Cleveland of the late Emperor, and her society is courted by all the aristocracy. She sometimes resides at a fazenda on one of her estates through which I carried my line. This fazenda has neither glass windows nor boarded floors. I saw her once in front of it, in the after part of the day, personally superintending the unloading a bullock- cart load of roots. Her dress consisted simply and solely of a dirty blue-and-white cotton gown, and a pair of clogs. I had previously met her at a party in Silo Paulo ; she was then dressed with considerable taste, in an exactly similar style to that in which a gentlewoman in England would have been on a similar occasion.

'• It is said that real gentlemen are to be found in every nation, and even here there are a few individuals to whom you would apply the term, meet them where you might. I know one or two who evince an immense amount of that kind of regard for other people's feelings which is characteristic of the gentleman of every age and clime. They, however, possess an inordinate share of that national repugnance to action which is the great bane of the country. Their stately inertia utterly defies descrip- tion. When they travel from their town houses to their country estates, they ride on mules at a pace scarcely exceeding three miles an hour, and are attended by a host of servants of all shades of colour, and by a number of baggage and extra saddle mules. At such times they vividly call to mind the descriptions of the old patriarchal journeys.

"An Oriental tinge runs through all the manners and customs of the country, and is seen particularly in the general deportment of the women. In the interior, the female members of a family are not permitted to make their appearance before strangers of the opposite sex. One sees nothing of them until a visit has been several times repeated. Even in the towns there is a con- siderable amount of shyness, especially when other people are present. They lead a wretchedly indolent life. Excepting in the upper classes, very few indeed of them can. read, and scarcely any even in the best society read any other books than French novels.

They conceive that fat constitutes beauty, and their great ambition is to become as broad as they are long. When they appear in the streets they are richly attired in European fashion ; but within doors their apparel is wretched and their habits are filthy. In the principal reception-rooms of the best houses in Sio Paulo ladies of quality may sometimes be seen publicly picking unmentionable insects from the heads of their negro children. In some of the streets of Rio they amuse themselves by standing on the balconies and spitting on the heads of the foot-passengers below. With scarcely an exception they all smoke, and very frequently; if one of them happens to occupy the same position in a room for a short time while thus engaged, the floor in her vicinity attests that the usual propensity for ex- pectoration on such occasions has been freely indulgad.

"After reading all this, you will, no doubt, be prepared to bear that the morality of the people is not in the most desirable state. A few of them are exceedingly honourable in their dealings ; but in general, honesty—in the sense in which the word is under- stood in England—can scarcely be said to exist ; and truthfulness is a quality which is neither valued nor possessed by more than a very few indeed of the inhabitants. Robberies on a large scale seldom occur. Highway robberies very rarely indeed take place, except in some particular localities ; and, considering the country, travelling is wonderfully safe. Small thefts, however, are committed by the poor people all day long, and with the utmost effrontery. Fraudulent dealings and peculation are con- stantly and almost openly practised by the trading and higher classes, so much so, that men who have resided many years in the country affirm that scarcely any Brazilian acquires wealth in any other way than by embezzlement.

Though highway robberies are very seldom heard of, murders for revenge are continually being committed, generally with impunity, and they are thought very little of. There are men living in most districts who are publicly known to be professional assassins. If a man has a grudge against another, by paying five or six pounds to one of these wretches lie can procuro the murder of his victim with scarcely any chance of discovery ; and even if discovered, a legal indemnity can be purchased by bribery without any great expense. The police arrangements are in- credibly atrocious; they are in the last degree abominable; I have myself bad some small experience of the unrestrained turpitude of the officers. "The most severe and sweeping charges are often made with regard to the sexual immorality of the Brazilians, but I think they are too broadly applied. That enormities of this kind are rife, that the practices are as gross and abominable as any that have over been recorded, and that the perpetrators, though publicly known, scarcely, if at all, lose caste in society, are most undoubted facts ; and the priests appear to be among the greatest delinquents. Still, I think that the majority of the inhabitants are pretty free from taints of the grosser kinds, and I believe that a large proportion of the women are as chaste as the generality of women in England. A practice exists here, and is of very common occurrence, particularly among the tradespeople, which, strange as it would appear to us, is not thought dis- honourable in Brazil. A man and woman live together for many years as man and wife, and bring up a family in the ordinary way, but defer marriage until approaching death. The ceremony is then performed on the death-bed of one of the contractors. It frequently happens, however, that when a woman is becoming old she is discarded, and a younger one adopted; but I believe that in such oases a periodical pecuniary allowance is made to the elder woman. There are many instances of the nerdy- adopted one being the man's own daughter by the discarded woman.

" The Roman Catholic ecclesiastics exercise their ordinary functions, but all the educated men regard the Church simply rte a political institution, and very many of them avow that religion is a proper thing for the amusement of women, but that its dogmas are not believed by any sane men.

"The gorgeous ceremonies of the Romish Church have become in Brazil undignified burlesques. They are regarded simply as tallowy spectacles, to be enjoyed in the same manner as any secular display of splendour. In the processions there is a total and entire absence of the reverential demeanour among the apeetatois which is so remarkable on the European continent.

"The churches are very plain buildings, most of them having no pretentious whatever to architectural effect. The bells are hung in open arches in an attached tower, and are exposed to view. There is a great clamour with them almost all day long ; in many of the churches they are not rung, but are made to emit an inordinate and most discordant sound by a couple of little niggers' with hammers, who seat themselves one on each side of a bell and pommel away most lustily. The interiors of the churches consist of scarcely anything more than four white- washed walls, with a few. barbarously rude images and a gaudily- coloured choir and altar-piece at one end. Many of them are absolutely beggarly. High up in the walls of the nave, built in the walls, and flush with them, there are little curtained private pews, which look exactly like boxes in a theatre. Excepting in these there are no seats. All the central part of the nave is devoted to women, and merely a narrow portion on each side and at the end opposite the choir, the west end, is left for men. The division is formed by a small hand-rail, often made only of sticks. In the Cathedral of Sao Paulo it is so rudely and carelessly constructed that the bark has not been removed from the sticks.

"Before the commencement of the service, and during portions of it, the women seat themselves on the floor. Very often their dresses form a splendid exhibition of rich colours, and great taste is displayed in their arrangement. On the great Saints' days even the slaves (the domestic slaves in the towns) are elegantly dressed in silk gowns and mantles. The elevation of the Host is announced by a discharge of fireworks, and there is scarcely an hour in the day when the air of the towns is not burdened with their reports. When the divinity has been manufactured, he is invisibly but audibly transmitted to heaven on a rocket.

"I ought not to conclude this letter without saying something about one subject which I have not yet.mentioned. Some years ago a system of German emigration to Brazil was set on foot. Whether the movement emanated originally from Germans or not I do not know, but the Brazilian Government took active measures to promote it, and still gives it considerable encouragement. The immigrants have various localities granted to them as settle- ments, and those districts are called German colonies. They are not prosperous. In one of them, near Rio de Janeiro, a large and handsome town has been built ; but the builders lost nearly all their investment, and the speeulation is said to be a complete failure. The name of the town is Petropolis. Ships still fre- quently arrive at Santos full of emigrants destined for a colony about a hundred miles beyond Sao Paulo. Thin proceeding is conducted by a German speculator, who, under sanction of the Brazilian Government, contracts to bring over families on con- dition of their remaining in his employment Until they have earned over and above their livelihood a previously stipulated siam—getierallY aboui seventy pounds—with accumulating in- terest..

" They are sent up the country on foot, under the strict sur- veillance of agents of the speculator, and it is pitiable in the extreme to see them trudging away in health and spirits and to know the fate that awaits them. Many years elapse before they can accumulate the requisite amount, and they thus virtually become the slaves of the speculator. They are let out for hire in the same manner as the negroes, and are treated almost in the same way, except that they are not flogged.

" When they have at last performed their part of the contract age has destroyed their vigour, and bitter experience their capa- city for enjoyment. With bodies debilitated by long years of labour on wretched diet, and with minds dispirited by their for- lorn position, they are left penniless in an alien and unproduc- tive country to eke out the remainder of their miserable existence as beat they may.

" The speculator employs agents in Germany to lure them away, and when they reach Brazil they are completely in his