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 one day as they emerged from an unusually excited scene.  “Write this down:  Nothing bores one like somebody else’s belated emotions.  When you’ve had some woman insist on kissing you after you’re tired of her, you’ll understand me better.  In the meantime, this is bad enough.  I can think of only one cure for what we’ve been through here, and that is a Sunday in London.  Let us start.”

“London!” breathed Lewis.  “Are we going to London?”