As Lewis finished putting them on, Leighton whirled on his heel.

“Ready, my boy?” The mask was gone.

Lewis laughed back into his father’s twinkling eyes.

“Yes, I’m ready,” he said rather breathlessly.  He followed his father out of the room.  The new clothes gripped him in awkward places, but as he glanced down at the well-pressed flannels, he felt glorified.

That night, while strolling in a back street of the lower town, they discovered a tunnel running into the cliff.  At its mouth was a turnstile.

“Shades of Avernus!  What’s this?” asked Leighton.

Lewis inquired of the gateman.

“It’s an elevator to the upper town,” he said.

They paid their fare and walked into the long tunnel.  At its end they found a prehistoric elevator and a terrific stench.  Leighton clapped his handkerchief to his nose and dived into the waiting car.  Lewis followed him.  An attendant started the car, and slowly they crept up and up, two hundred feet, to the crest of the cliff.  As they emerged, Leighton let go a mighty breath.

“Holy mackerel!” he said, “and what was that?  Ugh! it’s here yet!”

The attendant explained.  At the bottom of the shaft was a pit into which sank the great chains of the car.  The pit was full of crude castor-oil, cheapest and best of lubricants.

“My boy,” said Leighton, as he led the way at a rapid stride toward the hotel, “never confuse the picturesque with the ugly.  I can stand a bit of local color in the way of smells, but there’s such a thing as going too far, and that went it.  We’ll prepare at once to leave this town.  Would you like to go north or south?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Lewis.

“Well, we’ll just climb on board that big double-funnel that came in to-day and leave it to her.  What do you say?”

They went south.  Four days later, in the early morning, Lewis was wakened by a bath-robe hurled at his head.

“Put that on and come up on deck quick!” commanded his father.

Lewis gasped when he reached the deck.  They were just entering the harbor.  On the left, so close that it seemed to threaten them, loomed the Sugar-Loaf.  On the right, the wash of the steamer creamed on the rocks of Santa Cruz.  Before them opened the mighty bay, dotted with a hundred islands, some crowned with foliage, others with gleaming, white walls, and one with an aspiring minaret.  Between water and sky stretched the city.  There was no horizon, for the jagged wall of the Organ Mountains towered in a circle into the misty blue.  Heaven and earth were one.

A white line of surf-foam ran along all the edge of the bay.  Languorous Aphrodite of the cities of the world, Rio de Janeiro lay naked beyond that line, and gloried.  Like a dream of fair woman, her feet plunged in foam, her body reclining against the heights, her arms outstretched, green hills for her pillows, her diadem the shining mountain-peaks, queen of the cities of the earth by the gift of Almighty God, she gleamed beneath the kiss of dawn.