ghty God, she
gleamed beneath the kiss of dawn.

Leighton drew a long, long breath.

"It will take a lot of bad smells to blot the memory of _that_," he
said.

They came to the bad smells in about an hour and a quarter. An hour
later they left the custom-house. Then, each in a rocketing tilbury,
driven by a yelling Jehu, they shot through the narrow and filthy
streets of the Rio of that far day and drew up, still trembling with
fright, at the doors of the Hotel dos Estrangeiros.

"You got here, too!" cried Leighton as Lewis tumbled out of his cab. "We
had both wheels on the ground at once three separate times. How about
you?"

"I really don't know anything about what happened, sir," said Lewis,
grinning. "I was holding on."

"What were they yelling? Did you make anything out of that?" asked
Leighton, when they had surveyed their rooms and were washing.

"They were shouting at the people in the way," said Lewis. "My driver
yelled only two things. When a colored person was in the way, it was,
'Melt chocolate-drop!' and when he shouted at a white man, it was:
'Clear the way to hell! a foreigner rides with me.'"

"Boy," said Leighton, speaking through several folds of towel and the
open connecting-door, "if you ever find your brains running to seed, get
a job as a cabman. There's something about a cab, the world over, that
breeds wit."

CHAPTER XVI

The Rio of 1888 was seething at the vortex of the wordy battle for
emancipation. The Ouvidor, the smart street of the town, so narrow that
carriages were not allowed upon it, was the center of the maelstrom.
Here crowded politician and planter; lawyers, journalists, and students;
conservative and emancipationist.

At each end of the Ouvidor were squares where daily meetings were held
the emotional surge of which threatened to lap over into revolution at
any moment.

The emotion was real. Youths of twenty blossomed into verse never
equaled before or since in the writings of their prolific race. An
orator, maddened by the limits of verbal expression, shot himself
through the heart to add a fitting period to a thundered phrase. Women
forgot their own bondage, and stripped themselves of jewels for the
cause.

Leighton and his son, wandering through these scenes, felt like ghosts.
They had the certainty that all this had happened before. Their lonely,
calm faces drew upon them hostile, wondering stares.

"Got a clean tablet in your mind?" asked Leighton on