at all. He
led the way to the garden, where we passed the time till supper was
ready. The midshipmen found more oranges, and better than they had yet
met with, and did full justice to them. The fruit and vegetables of
Europe and America, of the temperate and torrid zones, meet here; nor
are their flowers forgotten: over against the little parterre, an orange
and a tamarind tree shade a pleasant bench; close to which, in something
of oriental taste, the white stucco wall of the well is raised and
crowned with flower-pots, filled with roses and sweet herbs.

_2d._--I rose at daylight, and rode with Mr. N. through the estate,
while Mr. Dance, my cousin Glennie, and the two boys, went to shoot in
the marsh by the river side.

Every turn in our ride brought a new and varied landscape into view:
beneath, the sugar-cane in luxuriant growth; above, the ripening orange
and the palm; around and scattered through the plain enlivened by the
windings of the Guazindiba, the lime, the guava, and a thousand odorous
and splendid shrubs, beautified the path.--But all is new here. The long
lines of fazenda houses, that now and then take from the solitariness of
nature, suggest no association with any advance either of old or present
time, in the arts that civilise or that ennoble man. The rudest
manufactures, carried on by African slaves, one half of whom are newly
imported, (that is, are still smarting under the separation from all
that endears the home, even of a savage,) are all the approaches to
improvement; and though nature is at least as fine as in India or in
Italy, the want of some reference to man, as an intellectual and moral
being, robs it of half its charms. However, I returned well pleased from
my ride, and found my young sportsmen not less pleased with their
morning's ramble. Not, indeed, that they had shot snipes, as they
intended, but they had gotten a huge lizard (_Lacerta Marmorata_), of a
kind they had not seen before. They had seen the large land-crab
(_Ruricola_), and they had brought down a boatswain bird, a sort of
pelican, (_Pelicanus Lencocephalus_), which they proposed to stuff.
Accordingly after breakfast, as the weather was too hot to walk farther,
the bird and the lizard were both skinned, the guns were cleaned, and I
made a sketch of the landscape.

In the evening I took a long walk to a point of view whence the whole
bay with the city in the distance is distinctly seen, and on the way
stopped at a cotta