of almost perpetual sunlight.  They spend the breeding season, the northern summer, in the land of the midnight sun, during the long arctic day.  They then fly for endless distances down across the north temperate zone, across the equator, through the lands where the days and nights are always of equal length, into another hemisphere, and spend another summer of long days and long twilights in the far south, where the Antarctic winds cool them, while their nesting home, at the other end of the world, is shrouded beneath the iron desolation of the polar night.

In the late afternoon of the 5th we reached the quaint old-fashioned little town of Sao Luis de Caceres, on the outermost fringe of the settled region of the 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 bluff; their skirts and bodices were red, blue, green, of all colors.  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 light, 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 government 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 open patio bordered by a gallery.  Lieutenant Lyra was to accompany us; he was an old companion of Colonel Rondon’s explorations.  We visited one or two of the stores to make some final purchases, and in the evening strolled through the dusky streets and under the trees of the plaza; the women and girls sat in groups in the doorways or at the windows, and here and there a stringed instrument tinkled in the darkness.