66 



NOTES ON BRAZIL. 



magnificence. The other apartments display little of convenience, and 

 less of cleanliness : the kitchen is excessively filthy. There is nothing 

 like a receptacle for dirt ; and all round the house is one unvaried 

 disgusting scene. 



In an exterior passage of the convent, a religious maniac has taken 

 up his abode ; he is said to have committed some enormous crime, and, 

 to appease angry heaven, never leaves the holy precincts. There he lives 

 upon precarious, but unasked charity ; and makes his bed on a heap of 

 small stones and broken pots, which he has collected. A non-entity like 

 this would not have been worth notice, but that many look upon him as 

 an inspired saint ; and nearly all consider the witless as favoured of heaven. 



At the back of the house the rock is precipitous, and quite 

 unguarded. There stands an old horizontal sun-dial, now rendered 

 almost useless by the clock, which announces the hour to the whole city. 

 The site of this dial commands a fine prospect of every part of the bay, 

 and its gnomon serves now as a compass, to assist in taking the bearings 

 of mountains, inlets, and islands. 



Saint Francisco is the patron of another convent, which stands upon 

 an equal eminence on the opposite side of the city. The ascent to it is 

 by a long inclined plane, which conducts to a paved area, from which 

 there is a fine view of the town, and a still finer of the Sugar-loaf The 

 Chapel is rich and well adorned ; the interior of the house remarkable for 

 its order and neatness. From this unusual praise the kitchen must be 

 excepted ; and certainly no Brazilian one should be seen by those who 

 make the smallest pretensions to delicacy. The library is a large room, 

 and contains many books. Here a volume of English sermons was 

 handed to me, and I was requested to read a page ; the subject was the 

 Trinity. I next happened to take down a volume of a quarto biblcj 

 containing the Psalms ; in one column the Vulgate, in the other a 

 Portuguese translation. I hardly know whether there was any particular 

 meaning in what followed, but on one of the Monks asking me if I 

 understood the liatin, and on my replying that I did, he hastily snatched 

 the book out of my hand, replaced it on the shelf, and hurried the party 



