It was Sunday, and the shops were shut with as much rigour as in Glasgow itself. I saw little to buy but parrots, oranges, and bananas. In the superb gardens we saw grand palms and other tropical plants new to me. The fan palm of Madagascar was perhaps the most remarkable, with its long oar-like leaves and stalks wonderfully fitted together in the old Grecian plait, each stalk forming a perfect reservoir of pure water, easily tapped from the trunk; thirsty travellers had good reason for naming this palm—strelitzia, or bird of paradise—their friend. The Frangipani (Plumeria sp.) trees were also in great beauty, covered with yellow or salmon-tinted waxen bunches of sweet-scented flowers shaped like large azaleas, but as yet almost leafless. The flowers go on blooming for many weeks, then come the leaves, and with them a huge black and orange caterpillar with a red head, which eats them all up in a very short time; in spite of this the vitality of the tree is so great that it soon flowers again. The natives say that the moth lays its eggs in the very pith of the wood, and that if a bit is taken as a cutting to any part of the world and a young tree grown from it, the caterpillar will also grow, and appear in time to eat up its first attempts at leaves. Ants seem to abound about Pernambuco, and I noticed that all the rose trees or other choice plants in the gardens had a circular trough of water round them, which I have little doubt is a protection till the clever little creatures learn to tunnel under them.
We drove out to the country by the Bonds, or street railways, which are now established in all the principal towns of Brazil, and are a great convenience and economy of time and money. These carriages are drawn by mules and go at a great pace; the sides are open, and a substantial awning keeps the sun off the roof so that one cannot well have cooler quarters at midday, obtaining at the same time a good sight of the country and its people.
At Bahia we also landed, and after mounting the steep zigzag to the top of the cliff had another drive into the country, which is wild, hilly, and covered with rich forests. The market was most entertaining and full of strange pictures. Huge negresses in low embroidered shirts, a gaudy skirt, and nothing else except a bright handkerchief or a few flowers on their heads, were selling screaming parrots, macaws, and marmosets, gorgeous little birds, monkeys, and other strange animals, including a raccoon with a bushy tail, and a great green lizard as big as a cat, which they said was very good to eat. I saw one girl quite covered with crawling and scratching marmosets; she never moved, but they did incessantly. One of the children onboard bought a very tiny marmoset, so small that he hollowed out a cocoanut shell, put some cotton wool in, and used to keep his pet in it, having cut off the small end to let it in and out; its tail was eight inches long and very bushy.
The oranges at Bahia are large and sweet, and they pack all their seeds into a kind of bag at one end, which renders them particularly easy to eat; the piles of this fruit as well as of melons, tomatoes, eggplants of different sorts, and pineapples make grand masses of rich colour, while bunches of sugarcane, great whorls of bananas, and heaps of cocoanuts form a fine background. Lazy people were carried up the steep streets sitting on chairs in a kind of crazy palanquin, which was hung on a bent pole and carried on two men’s shoulders; if the passenger were not a fidget he might arrive at the top of the hill uninjured. We did not try, but tired ourselves out in the usual British manner on foot and were not sorry to get back to the Neva again. It took us in two more days safely into the beautiful Bay of Rio, which certainly is the most lovely seascape in the world: even Naples and Palermo must be content to hold a second place to it in point of natural beauty.
I soon felt myself at home in Rio, and in a few days had a large airy room and dressing room at the top of the hotel, with views from the windows, which in every changing mood of the weather were a real pleasure to study; both the Sugarloaf and Corcovado mountains and part of the bay also were within sight.
The town of Rio has a great look of its relations in Spain or Sicily; the houses so full of colour, the balconies of such varied form; and the tiled roofs project in the same way, with highly ornamented and coloured waterspouts and terminals: the inhabitants have the same love of hanging out gaudy draperies and bright flowers from their windows and balconies, with the addition of parrots and monkeys screaming and scrambling after the passersby, who are fortunately generally well out of reach. One day, however, I saw a tall slave girl’s tray of oranges robbed by a spider monkey as she walked underneath with a well-balanced pyramid of fruit on her head. The shops in the streets seem very good, but the things are principally from Europe and exorbitantly dear.
Brazil offers to a stranger few inducements for spending money, except its wonderful natural curiosities, its gorgeous birds and butterflies; “Even its bugs are gems,” a Yankee friend remarked to me, and these latter are set in gold as ornaments, with considerable taste and fineness of workmanship. To me the hummingbirds were the great temptation. M. Bourget, one of Agassiz’s late travelling companions, had a rare collection that he valued at three hundred guineas, and I passed many happy mornings among his treasures hearing him talk of them and of their habits; but after the first few days I seldom went into the town.
The mule cars passed the door of the hotel every ten minutes and took me at six o’clock everyday to the famous Botanical Gardens, about four miles off. The whole road is lovely, skirting the edges of two bays, both like small lakes, to which one sees no outlet; the mountains around them are most strangely formed—on one side generally a sheer precipice, on the other covered with forests to the very top; and such forests! Not the woolly-looking woods of Europe, but endless varieties of form and colour, from the white large-leaved trumpet trees to the feathery palms, scarlet coral (Erythrina sp.), and lilac quaresma trees. Then the villa gardens along the roadside were full of rich flowers and fruits and noble trees; at one place a sort of marsh with masses of Indian bamboo gave the eyes a pleasant rest after the glaring gaudiness of the gardens. That drive was always charming and fresh to me, and I wished the mules had not been in such a hurry; but they were all splendid animals and seemed to enjoy going at full gallop, after the first little scene of kicking and rearing, which they considered the right thing at starting. They often went too fast, and would have arrived at the station before the appointed time if they had not been checked.
The gardens of Botofogo were a never-ending delight to me; and as the good Austrian director allowed me to keep my easel and other things at his house, I felt quite at home there, and for some time worked everyday and all day under its shady avenues, only returning at sunset to dine and rest, far too tired to pay evening visits, and thereby disgusted some of my kind friends.
Of course my first work was to attempt to make a sketch of the great avenue of royal palms (Roystonea regia), which has been so often described. It is a half mile long at least, and the trees are one hundred feet high, though only thirty years old; they greatly resemble the cabbage palm of the West Indies, though less graceful, having the same great green sheaths to their leafstalks, which peel off and drop with the leaves when ripe; about five fell in the year, and each left a distinct ring on the smooth trunk. The base of the trunk was much swollen out and looked like a giant bulb. This huge avenue looked fine from wherever you saw it (and reminded me of the halls of Karnac). There were grand specimens of other palms in the gardens: a whole row of the curious screwpine (Pandanus sp.), with its stilted roots and male and female trees; rows of camphor trees (Cinnamomum camphora), bamboos, the jackfruit (Artocarpus sp.), with its monstrous pumpkin-like fruits hanging close to the rough trunks, and endless other interesting plants and trees. Beyond all rose the great blue hills. One could mount straight from the gardens to their woods and hollows, with running water everywhere.
The garden seemed a favourite place for picnics, and tables and benches were set up under the wide-spreading bamboos and other trees. One day a most genial party settled near me, several of whom talked English; one of them brought me a saucer of delicious strawberries with sugar and champagne poured over them; he said they were not so good as those in England, but the