ing School
of Dom Pedro II." It accommodated two hundred students. The Emperor
supported the school. In 1887 the school was moved to larger quarters.
Dr. Shepard is renting the property for our college, but our school
like Dom Pedro's has outgrown these quarters and we are compelled to
rent additional buildings some distance away to accommodate the
increasing number of students. There are about three hundred students
in all departments.

As we studied the situation at close range, we had it driven in upon us
that one of the greatest needs in Brazil is the one Dr. Shepard and his
co-laborers are trying to meet in this school. Three-fourths of the
population of Brazil cannot read. We need, above all things now,
educated leaders. What a call is there for trained native pastors and
evangelists! Some of the Seminary students have been preaching as many
as twenty-one times a month in addition to carrying their studies in
the school. Dr. Shepard has been forced to stop them from some of this
preaching because it was preventing successful work in the class room.
The need is so great that it is very difficult to keep the students
from such work.

I must not go too far afield from the subject of this chapter, but I
must take the time to say that nothing breaks down prejudice against
the gospel more effectively than do the schools conducted by the
various mission boards. One day a Methodist colporter entered a town in
the interior of the State of Minas Geraes and began to preach and offer
his Bibles for sale in the public square. Soon a fanatical mob was
howling around him and his life was in imminent peril. Just as the
excitement was at the highest two young men belonging to one of the
best families in the place pressed through the crowd and, ascertaining
that the man was a minister of the gospel, took charge of him and drove
off the mob. They led the colporter to their home, which was the best
in the town, and showed him generous hospitality. They invited the
people in to hear him preach, and thus through their kindness the man
and his message received a favorable hearing. It should be remembered,
too, that these young men belonged to a very devout Roman Catholic
family.

What was the secret of their actions? They had rescued, entertained and
enabled to preach a man who was endeavoring to propagate a faith that
was very much opposed to their own. The explanation is that they had
attended Granberry College, that great Methodi