156 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



owners and gold seekers; killers of men and 

 lovers of women. There was a palace and a 

 cathedral and a fort, adorned with paintings 

 and carvings. All are in ruins now; the rank 

 vegetation of the tropics, beautiful and lethal, 

 has covered them and twisted them asunder; 

 for the strange little one-time capital city is 

 dead, and those that dwelt therein have left 

 it. 



The next comers followed a route that led 

 from the opposite direction, the south. These 

 were the Paolistas. At Sao Paulo, almost un- 

 der the Tropic of Cancer, the Portuguese con- 

 querors married with the women of the native 

 Indians, and made, first slaves, and then sol- 

 diers, of men from many Indian tribes. They 

 all became welded together into one people, 

 speaking Portuguese, but largely, and probably 

 mainly, Indian by blood; and being of various 

 martial stocks, with the morals of the viking 

 age, they grew into a community of freebooters 

 whose raiding expeditions, carried on with the 

 utmost energy, daring, and ruthlessness, spread 

 terror far and wide. Early in the nineteenth 

 century these hardy horsemen and boatmen, 

 searching for gold, land, and slaves, penetrated 

 to the headwaters of the Paraguay, and with 

 their advent began the first rude change from 



