Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1910 — A GLIMPSE OF FAIRYLAND. [ARTICLE]

A GLIMPSE OF FAIRYLAND.

Bird* pad Orchid* Look Alik* Alms Brasilian Hallway. Thirty-four miles in three hours as a run for an express train strikes owe as queer, but that is the regular schedule between Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Santos. Incidentally the road descends 2,000 feet in those thirty-four miles. The time would be better but for the fact that a part of the distance is traversed by a cable which is deliberation Itself. It was originally planned to make the road all steam, but according to the American consul it Santos the route map submitted by the engineers looked too much like the ice after a figure skating contest. The stockholders protested and got the cable section. > “But no one save a man late for his home-bound steamer,” says a writer in the Travel Magazine, “is jus:ifled in complaining of the slowness of the trains, especially those of J.he cable division. You skirt on viaducts, cliffs that would be bare and forbidding in other latitudes, but which here lift in mile long walls of verdant tapestries. “You wind through gorges amid a reckless riot of tropical vegetation that casts a weird green light like that of an ice cavern and sets you planning to come back on foot the next day to explore at your leisure the leafy vistas opening to right and left and revealing tantalizing glimpses of their dewy depths. “You see a glint of color up on a limb of a gaunt pala tree, in the identical spot where a cluster of bright polished parasitic looking leaves leads you to believe there should be an orchid, and while you still hold it with your eye down it flutters with a mild scream. “You pelt a pack of cards at a bird perched a few feet from the track on a rotten stump and discover an instant later that you have dealt to a dummy in the form of a flower more splendid than you.ever dreamed flower could be. Then you become so absorbed in the classification of orchid birds and birds orchids that only the timely jerk your seat companion gives your coattails saves you from being guillotined by a half fallen bough that comes rat-a-tatting down along the car windows. "This short bit of composite railroad running down from Sao Paulc to Santos through scenery lovely enough to warrant its acquisition by a fairy syndicate for subdivision into Titania’s bowers Is the artery through which flows nearly the whole coffee output of Brazil, more than half of the world’s supply. This in the ’9o’» often amounted to over 10,000,000 bags a year, in excess of 25,000 bags a day.”