nd willing to deceive
them, by assisting in the corruption of their families." Here then is
another curse of slavery; and this view of the subject has opened my
eyes on many points, on which I have hitherto been wondering ignorantly.

There were several very pleasant French naval officers here to-night,
and a few, very few English. I conversed with some sensible and
well-bred Brazilians, so that I was scarcely aware of the lateness of
the hour, when I left my younger friends dancing at midnight.

While at the ball, the tragic story of two lovely girls was told me.
When mere children, they had accompanied their mother to some gala, and
on returning at night, just as the mother advanced from the carriage,
she was shot from the veranda of her own house. All search for the
murderer was vain: but conjecture points to two possible causes of the
crime. One, the jealousy of a woman, who it seems had been injured, and
who hoped to succeed her rival as the wife of the man she loved; but he
has not married again. Another conjecture is, that she was acquainted
with some political secrets, and that fear caused her death. However it
was, the girls have ever since lived with their grandmother, who cannot
sleep if they are not both in the room with her. The family attachments
here are quite beautiful; they are as close and as intimate as those of
clanship in Scotland: but they have their inconveniences, in the
constant intermarriages between near relations, as uncles with their
nieces, aunts with their nephews, &c.; so that marriages, instead of
widening connections, diffusing property, and producing more general
relations in the country, seems to narrow all these, to hoard wealth,
and to withdraw all the affections into too close and selfish a circle.

_30th_.--I went early to town, and found that the English packet had
arrived. She fell in with Lord Cochrane's squadron near Bahia, so that
His Lordship must be there long ere this time; she brings reports that
the royalist party are becoming too strong for the Cortes at Lisbon.

I spent the day with Madame do Rio Seco. Her house is really a
magnificent one; it has its ball-room, and its music-room, its grotto
and fountains, besides extremely handsome apartments of every kind, both
for family and public use, with rather more china and French clocks than
we should think of displaying, but which do not assort ill with the
silken hangings and gilt mouldings of the rooms.

The dinner wa