water.
Moses crooned and chuckled gratefully when he was stroked and tickled.

Late the first evening we moored to the bank by a little fazenda of
the poorer type. The houses were of palm-leaves. Even the walls were
made of the huge fronds or leafy branches of the wawasa palm, stuck
upright in the ground and the blades plaited together. Some of us went
ashore. Some stayed on the boats. There were no mosquitoes, the
weather was not oppressively hot, and we slept well. By five o'clock
next morning we had each drunk a cup of delicious Brazilian coffee,
and the boats were under way.

All day we steamed slowly up-stream. We passed two or three fazendas.
At one, where we halted to get milk, the trees were overgrown with
pretty little yellow orchids. At dark we moored at a spot where there
were no branches to prevent our placing the boats directly alongside
the bank. There were hardly any mosquitoes. Most of the party took
their hammocks ashore, and the camp was pitched amid singularly
beautiful surroundings. The trees were wawasa palms, some with the
fronds cresting very tall trunks, some with the fronds--seemingly
longer--rising almost from the ground. The fronds were of great
length; some could not have been less than fifty feet long. Bushes and
tall grass, dew-drenched and glittering with the green of emeralds,
grew in the open spaces between. We left at sunrise the following
morning. One of the sailors had strayed inland. He got turned round
and could not find the river; and we started before discovering his
absence. We stopped at once, and with much difficulty he forced his
way through the vine-laced and thorn-guarded jungle toward the sound
of the launch's engines and of the bugle which was blown. In this
dense jungle, when the sun is behind clouds, a man without a compass
who strays a hundred yards from the river may readily become
hopelessly lost.

As we ascended the river the wawasa palms became constantly more
numerous. At this point, for many miles, they gave their own character
to the forest on the river banks. Everywhere their long, curving
fronds rose among the other trees, and in places their lofty trunks
made them hold their heads higher than the other trees. But they were
never as tall as the giants among the ordinary trees. On one towering
palm we noticed a mass of beautiful violet orchids growing from the
side of the trunk, half-way to the top. On another big tree, not a
palm, which stood in a little o