To continue my account. There were the large dark halls with vaults and domes; they were covered with negroes, each with a candle stuck in his black head, hammering in time to some tune to which they were all singing. It would have been a wonderful picture for a painter. How often all my life I have regretted not to have been an artist, instead of musical! The negroes are healthy and well doing; they only work eight hours a day, and have over-pay for anything extra. The mulattoes were the most surly looking ones. After having seen everything we ascended again, and if I may say so, I think the ascent was worse than the going down, and nobody knows, until they have tried that sort of darkness, what daylight and sunlight and fresh air mean. After long mounting, you see at last one star sparkling in the distance like an eye, which appears miles off, and that is the mouth of the shaft.
In the evening there was a concert and a ball amongst ourselves. On the 27th Richard lectured; there were some private theatricals in which I took a part, and forgetting the drop behind the open-air, theatre when I backed off, I fell. I sprained my ankle so badly that my leg was all black, and I could not move. Now, the worst of it was that we were going to canoe down the San Francisco river, to come out at the falls of Paulo Affonso, issuing at Bahía, and back to Rio by steamer; but it was impossible to take a woman who could not walk. We could embark at Sabará, a short distance from where we were, and as Richard's time was very short, and he could not take a lame woman, he had to start without me, and I went in the litter to see him embark in the boat Elisa.
As soon as I got well, Mr. Gordon, who was an exceedingly liberal, large-minded man, recognized that having three thousand Catholic negroes under him, manned by twenty-five English Protestant officers, it was quite possible that in a religious sense, things might be made more comfortable to them, and he asked me, as an educated English Catholic, to go the rounds of Church and Hospital, and find out if there was anything that could improve their condition. Having been for some time in Brazil, and seeing the wants of the negroes, I thought I could put my finger on the right spot at once. There was one particular ward in the hospital where incurables were put, and a black cross over their beds told them Dante's old words, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate" ("Leave every hope (outside), all ye who enter (here)"). I dismissed the attendant, for fear they should be afraid to answer, walked round the wards and sat by them, and I will take one case as a specimen of the whole. She was dying of diseases which need not be named here. I said to her—
"Has your case been given over by the doctor?"
"Alas! yes," she said; "I have only got to wait."
"Should you like to live?"
"Yes, of course I should."
"Has the priest been to hear your confession? Have you sent for him?"
"Oh no; I should not dare do that."