CHAP. IV] SAO LUIS DE CACERES 123 



state of Matto Grosso, the last town we should see 

 before reaching the villages of the Amazon. As we 

 approached we passed half-clad black washerwomen on 

 the river's edge. The men, with the local band, were 

 gathered at the steeply sloping foot of the main street, 

 where the steamer came to her moorings. Groups of 

 women and girls, white and brown, watched us from 

 the low bluflf; their skirts and bodices were red, blue, 

 green, of all colours. Sigg had gone ahead with much 

 of the baggage ; he met us in an improvised motor-boat, 

 consisting of a dugout, to the side of which he had 

 clamped our Evinrude motor ; he was giving several of 

 the local citizens of prominence a ride, to their huge 

 enjoyment. The streets of the little town were unpaved, 

 with narrow brick sidewalks. The one-story houses 

 were white or blue, with roofs of red tiles and window- 

 shutters of latticed woodwork, come down from colonial 

 days and tracing back through Christian and Moorish 

 Portugal to a remote Arab ancestry. Pretty faces, 

 some dark, some hght, looked out from these windows ; 

 their mothers' mothers, for generations past, must thus 

 have looked out of similar windows in the vanished 

 colonial days. But now, even here in Caceres, the 

 spirit of the new Brazil is moving ; a fine new govern- 

 ment school has been started, and we met its principal, 

 an earnest man doing excellent work, one of the many 

 teachers who, during the last few years, have been 

 brought to Matto Grosso from Sao Paulo, a centre of 

 the new educational movement which will do so much 

 for Brazil. 



Father Zahm went to spend the night with some 

 French Franciscan friars, capital fellows. I spent the 

 night at the comfortable house of Lieutenant Lyra ; 

 a hot-weather house with thick walls, big doors, and an 



