of the country. We had the corpse clothed in a robe of fine calico, crossed her hands on her breast over a “ palma” of flowers, and made also a crown of flowers for her head. Scores of helpless children like our poor Oria die at Ega, or on the road; but generally not the slightest care is taken of them during their illness. They are the captives made during the merciless raids of one section of the Mirdnha tribe on the territories of another, and sold to the Ega traders. The villages of the attacked hordes are surprised, and the men and women killed or driven into the thickets without having time to save their children. There appears to be no doubt that the Mirdnhas are cannibals, and therefore the purchase of these captives probably saves them from a worse fate. The demand for them at Ega operates, however, as a direct cause of the supply, stimulating the unscrupulous chiefs, who receive all the profits, to undertake these murderous expeditions. _ It is remarkable how quickly the savages of the various nations, which each have their own, to all appearance, widely different language, learn Tupi on their arrival at Ega, where it is the common idiom. This perhaps may be attributed chiefly to the grammatical forms of all the Indian tongues being the same, although the words are different. As far as I could learn, the feature is common to all, of placing the preposition after the noun, making it, in fact, a fos+position, thus: “he is come the village from”; “go him wth, the plantation 7,” and so forth. The ideas to be expressed in their limited sphere of life and thought are few; consequently the stock of words is extremely small; besides, all Indians have the same way of thinking, and the same objects to talk about; these circumstances also contribute to the ease with which they learn each other’s language. Hordes of the same tribe living on the same branch rivers, speak mutually unintelligible languages; this happens with the Miranhas on the Japurti, and with the Collinas on the Jurta; whilst Tupi is spoken with little corruption along the banks of the main Amazons for a distance of 2500 miles. The purity of Tupi is kept up by frequent communication amongst the natives, from one end to the other of the main river; how complete and long-continued must be the isolation in which the small groups of savages have lived in other parts, to have caused so complete a segregation of dialects! It is probable that the strange inflexibility of the Indian organisation, both bodily and mental, is owing to the isolation in which each small tribe has lived, and to the narrow round of life and thought, and close intermarriages for countless generations, which are the necessary results. Their fecundity is of a low degree, for it is very rare to find an Indian family having so many as four children; and we have seen how great is their liability to sickness and death on removal from place to place.

I have already remarked on the different way in which the climate of this equatorial region affects Indians and negroes. No one could live long amongst the Indians of the Upper Amazons, without being struck with their constitutional dislike to the heat. Europeans certainly withstand the high temperature better than the original inhabitants of the country; I always found I could myself bear exposure to the sun or unusually hot weather quite as well as the Indians, although not well fitted by nature for a hot climate. Their skin is always hot to the touch,

and they perspire little. No Indian resident of Ega can be induced to stay in the village (where the heat is felt more than in the forest or on the river) for many days together. They bathe many times a day, but do not plunge in the water, taking merely a sifs-bath, as dogs may be seen doing in hot climates, to cool the lower parts of the body. The women and children, who often remain at home, whilst the men are out for many days together fishing, generally find some excuse for trooping off to the shades of the forest in the hot hours of the afternoons. They are restless and discontented in fine dry weather, but cheerful in cool days, when the rain is pouring down on their naked backs. When suffering under fever, nothing but strict watching can prevent them from going down to bathe in the river, or eating immoderate quantities of juicy fruits, although these indulgences are frequently the cause of death. They are very subject to disorders of the liver, dysentery, and other diseases of hot climates;and when any epidemic is about, they fall ill quicker, and suffer more than negroes or even whites. How different all this is with the negro, the true child of tropical climes! The impression gradually forced itself on my mind that the red Indian lives as a stranger or immigrant in these hot regions, and that his constitution was not originally adapted, and has not since become perfectly adapted, to the climate.. ' It is a case of want of fitness; other races of men living on the earth would have been*better fitted to enjoy and make use of the rich unappropriated domain. Unlike the lands peopled by Negro and Caucasian, tropical America had no indigenous man thoroughly suited to its conditions, and was therefore peopled by an ill-suited race from another continent. The Indian element is very prominent in the amusements of the Ega people. All the Roman Catholic holidays are kept up with great spirit; rude Indian sports being mingled with the ceremonies introduced by the Portuguese. Besides these, the aborigines celebrate their own ruder festivals: the people of different tribes combining: for, in most of their features, the merry-makings were originally alike in all the tribes. The Indian idea of a holiday is bonfires, processions, masquerading, especially the mimicry of different kinds of animals, plenty of confused drumming and fifing, monotonous dancing, kept up hour after hour without intermission, and, the most important point of all, getting gradually and completely drunk. But he attaches a kind of superstitious significance to these acts, and thinks that the amusements appended to the Roman Catholic holidays, as celebrated by the descendants of the Portuguese, are also an essential part of the religious ceremonies. But in this respect the uneducated whites and half-breeds are not a bit more enlightened than the poor dull-souled Indian. All look upon a religious holiday as an amusement, in which the priest takes the part of director or chief actor.

Almost every unusual event, independent of saints’ days, is made the occasion of a holiday by the sociable, easy-going people of the white and mameluco classes: funerals, christenings, weddings, the arrival of strangers, and so forth. The custom of “waking” the dead is also ~ kept up. A few days after I arrived I was awoke in the middle of a

dark moist night by Cardozo, to sit up with a neighbour whose wife had just died. I found the body laid out on a table, with crucifix and lighted wax candles at the head, and the room full of women and girls squatted on stools or on their haunches. The men were seated round the open door, smoking, drinking coffee, and telling stories; the be-reaved husband exerting himself much to keep the people merry during the remainder of the night. The Ega people seem to like an excuse for turning night into day; it is so cool and pleasant, and they can sit about during these hours in the open air, clad as usual in simple shirt and trousers, without streaming with perspiration.

The patron saint is Santa Theresa; the festival at whose anniversary lasts, like most of the others, ten days. It begins very quietly with evening litanies sung in the church, which are attended by the greater part of the population, all clean and gaily dressed in calicoes and muslins; the girls wearing jasmines and other natural flowers in their hair, no other headdress being worn by females of any class. The evenings pass pleasantly; the church is lighted up with wax candles, and illuminated on the outside by a great number of little oil lamps-rude clay cups, or halves of the thick rind of the bitter orange, which are fixed all over the front. The congregation seems very attentive, and the responses to the litany of Our Lady, sung by a couple of hundred fresh female voices, ring agreeably through the still village. Towards the end of the festival the fun commences. The managers of the feast keep open houses, and dancing, drumming, tinkling of wire guitars, and unbridled drinking by both sexes, old and young, are kept up for a couple of days and a night with little intermission. The ways of the people at these merry-makings, of which there are many in the course of the year, always struck me as being not greatly different from those seen at an old-fashioned village wake in retired parts of England. The old folks look on and get very talkative over their cups; the children are allowed a little extra indulgence in sitting up; the dull, reserved fellows become loquacious, shake one another by the hand or slap each other on the back, discovering, all at once, what capital friends they are. The cantankerous individual gets quarrelsome, and the amorous unusually loving. The Indian, ordinarily so taciturn, finds the use of his tongue, and gives the minutest details of some little dispute which he had with his master years ago, and which every one else had forgotten; just as I have known lumpish labouring men in England do, when half-fuddled. One cannot help reflecting, when witnessing these traits of manners, on the similarity of human nature everywhere, when classes are compared whose state of culture and conditions of life are pretty nearly the same.

The Indians play a conspicuous part in the amusements at St. John’s eve, and at one or two other holidays which happen about that time of the year—the end of June. In some of the sports the Portuguese element is visible, in others the Indian; but it must be recollected that masquerading, recitative singing, and so forth, are common originally to both peoples. A large number of men and boys disguise themselves to represent different grotesque figures, animals or persons. Two or three dress themselves up as giants, with the help of a tall

framework. One enacts the part of the Caypor, a kind of sylvan deity similar to the Curupira which I have before mentioned. The belief in this being seems to be common to all the tribes of the Tupi stock. According to the figure they dressed up at Ega, he is a bulky, misshapen monster, with red skin and long shaggy red hair hanging half-way down his back. They believe that he has subterranean campos and hunting grounds in the forest, well stocked with pacas and deer. He is not at all an object of worship, nor of fear, except to children, being considered merely as a kind of hobgoblin. Most of the masquers make themselves up as animals—bulls, deer, magoary storks, jaguars, and so forth, with the aid of light frameworks, covered with old cloth dyed or painted, and shaped according to the object represented. Some of the imitations which I saw were capital. One ingenious fellow arranged an old piece of canvas in the form of a tapir, placed himself under it, and crawled about on all fours. He constructed an elastic nose to resemble that of the tapir, and made, before the doors of the principal residents, such a good imitation of the beast grazing, that peals of laughter greeted him wherever he went. Another man walked about solitarily, masked as a jabirti crane (a large animal standing about four feet high), and mimicked the gait and habits of the bird uncommonly well. One year an Indian lad imitated me, to the infinite amusement of the townsfolk. He came the previous day to borrow of me an old blouse and straw hat. I felt rather taken in when I saw him, on the night of the performance, rigged out as an entomologist, with an insect net, hunting bag, and pincushion. To make the imitation complete, he had borrowed the frame of an old pair of spectacles, and went about with it straddled over his nose. ‘The jaguar now and then made a raid amongst the crowd of boys who were dressed as deer, goats, and so forth. The masquers kept generally together, moving from house to house, and the performances were directed by an old musician, who sang the orders and explained to the spectators what was going forward in a kind of recitative, accompanying himself on a wire guitar. The mixture of Portuguese and Indian customs is partly owing to the European immigrants in these parts having been uneducated men, who, instead of introducing European civilisation, have descended almost to the level of the Indians, and adopted some of their practices. ‘The performances take place in the evening, and occupy five or six hours; bonfires are lighted along the grassy streets, and the families of the better class are seated at their doors, enjoying the wild but good-humoured fun.

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