small town of twelve hundred inhabitants, on the north bank, airily situated on a high bluff and in a hilly district. The river here is contracted to a breadth of rather less than a mile (1738 yards), and the entire volume of its waters, the collective product of a score of mighty streams, is poured through the strait with tremendous velocity, and a depth of from thirty to forty fathoms. Behind is an extensive lake, called the Lago Grande da Villa Franca, which communicates with the Amazons both above and below Obydos. The inhabitants of Santarem are mainly whites, and they have lately imported negroes, before which they used to do, what a free negro is said to have recommended us to do in Australia, to force servitude on the Indians. It is indeed questionable if it is not better to teach the savages to earn a livelihood by honest industry, than to let them starve in idleness. There were heiresses at Obydos whose property was reckoned in cacao plantations, oxen, and slaves. Some enterprising young men had come over from Para and Maranham to appropriate to themselves the ladies and their fortunes. The people were very sociable and hospitable, but only one had enterprise sufficient to establish a sugar-mill.

The forest around Obydos was more varied than it is in the Amazons region generally, and is rendered utterly impenetrable by the thick undergrowth of plants of the pine-apple order, and by cacti. Monkeys abounded, and one species, a coaita, is much esteemed as an article of food. The worst is, that this is just the most mild, affectionate, intelligent, and human-like monkey. A wood-cricket is also met with here that sings so loudly that the natives place it, like a bird, in a wickerwork cage. Mr. Bates likewise met with some transition forms here among butterflies, which he believes tend to show that a physiological species can be and is produced in nature out of the varieties of a pre-existing closely allied one. The process of origination of a species in nature, he remarks, as it takes place successively, must be ever, perhaps, beyond man's power to trace, on account of the great lapse of time it requires. But we can obtain a fair view of it by tracing a variable and far-spreading species over the wide area of its present distribution, and a long observation of such will lead to the conclusion that new species in all cases must have arisen out of variable and widely disseminated forms.

Mr. Bates started from Obydos in a trader's boat, passing on his way numerous houses, each surrounded by its grove of cacao-trees. A cacaotree costs about sixpence, and one family manages its own small plantation of ten to fifteen thousand trees. The life of these cacao cultivators is pleasant: the work is all done under the shade, and occupies only a few weeks in the year. But the people are poor, for they have no gardens, orchards, or domestic animals, and they live on fish and farinha. At nighttime the boat generally lay to, and dinner was also cooked ashore, either in a shady nook of the forest or at the house of some settler. The mornings were cool and pleasant, but by evening the heat would grow intolerable; later, however, the hours were delicious. The hammocks were swung on deck, and they went to sleep amid a perpetual chorus of animals, among whom the chief performers were the howling monkeys. Their frightful, unearthly roar deepened the feeling of solitude which crept on as darkness closed around them. Soon after, the fireflies came forth and flitted about the trees. As night advanced, all became silent in the forest,

save the occasional hooting of tree-frogs, or the monotonous chirping of wood-crickets and grasshoppers. Now and then they came to large islands with sand-banks-open spaces in which the canoe-men take great delight -and hence they generally land at them, spending part of the day in washing and cooking. These sand-banks resembled the sea-shore. Flocks of white gulls were flying overhead, and sandpipers coursed along the edge of the water. These birds must have adapted fluviatile habits like the tern on the Nile and Euphrates. In this peculiarity they are analogous to the dolphins and porpoises, which in so vast a stream as the Amazons are, as we have seen, no longer marine, but purely fluviatile creations. There were also plenty of rarer birds, ibises, unicorn-birds, that bray like a jackass, barbets, or pig-birds, and others.

An elevated wooded promontory constitutes the boundary between the provinces of Para and Amazons. Beyond this the explorers stopped four days at the village of Villa Nova. There were pools here, in which grew the Victoria water-lily, and which swarmed with water-fowl, snowy egrets, striped herons, and gigantic storks. Canary-birds and macaws were stirring in the trees. There were also hawks and eagles. At a subsequent period, Mr. Bates passed eight months at this lively spot. The whole tract of land here is, in reality, a group of islands which extend from a little below Villa Nova to the mouth of the Madiera, a distance of one hundred and eighty miles; the breadth of this island and lacustrine district varying from ten to twenty miles. The country bordering these interior waters is said to be extremely fertile and not insalubrious, the broad lakes having clear waters and sandy shores. They abound in fish and turtle, and swarm with wild-fowl. The woods, unfortunately, abound in ticks, as in red acari in other places, which mount to the tips of blades of grass, and attach themselves to the clothes of passers-by. Mr. Bates says it occupied him a full hour daily to pick them off his flesh after his diurnal rambles. The Urubu vultures were another annoyance. They are so bold that if the kitchen was left unguarded for a moment, they walked in and lifted the lids of the saucepans with their beaks to rob them of their contents. They also follow the fishermen to the lakes, where they gorge themselves with the offal of the fisheries. Kept in their proper places, they are manifestly useful scavengers. The butterflies were at once colossal and most beautiful, and our naturalist describes it as a grand sight to see them by twos and threes floating at a great height in the still air of a tropical morning.

A next stay of ten days was made at a village where a line of clay cliffs diverts the course of the river. At a festival here, the meal consisted of a large boiled pirarucu-a manatee, or river cow-which had been harpooned for the purpose in the morning. Mr. Bates describes the meat as having the taste of very coarse pork; but the fat, which lies in thick layers, is of a greenish colour, and of a disagreeable, fishy flavour. The manatee, or 66 vacca marina," as it is also called, is one of the few objects which excite the dull wonder and curiosity of the Indians, notwithstanding that it is very common. The fact of its suckling its young at the breast, although an aquatic animal, seems to strike them as something very strange. One was killed on the Upper Amazons which was nearly ten feet in length, and nine feet in girth at the broadest part.

Mr. Bates did not proceed on his first ascent of the Amazons beyond Barra,

a large goodly town at the junction of the Rio Negro, and which is now the principal station for the lines of steamers which were established in 1853 -a steamer running once a fortnight between Para and Barra, and a bimonthly one plying between the latter place and Nanta, in the Peruvian territory. On a second excursion, Mr. Bates left Barra for Ega, the first town of any importance on the Solimoens, while Mr. Wallace explored the Rio Negro. The distance is nearly four hundred miles, which he accomplished in a small cuberta, manned by ten stout Cucama Indians, in thirty-five days. On this occasion he spent twelve months in the region of the Amazons. He revisited the same country in 1855, and devoted three years and a half to a fuller exploration of its natural productions. This in addition to his residence at Santarem and the exploration of the Tapajos.

upper

The sketches of life and of the aspects of nature under such various circumstances, and during such a lengthened period, are minutely detailed and very entertaining-nor were all these explorations effected without adventures. When on the Cupari, a tributary to the Tapajos, a Sucuruju (the Indian (name for the anaconda, or great water-serpent, Eunectes murinus) robbed the hencoop in the boat. Some days afterwards, the young men belonging to the different sitios agreed together to go in search for the serpent, which had committed many other depredations. It was found, after a long search, sunning itself on a log at the mouth of a muddy rivulet, and was despatched with harpoons. It was not a large one, only eighteen feet nine inches in length, but it had a most hideous appearance, owing to its being very broad in the middle and tapering abruptly at both ends.

At Ega, Mr. Bates relates, a large anaconda was near making a meal of a young lad about ten years of age. The father and his son went one day in their montaria a few miles up the Teffé, to gather wild fruit; landing on a sloping, sandy shore, where the boy was left to mind the canoe whilst the man entered the forest. The beaches of the Teffé form groves of wild guava and myrtle-trees, and during most months of the year are partly overflown by the river. Whilst the boy was playing in the water under the shade of these trees, a huge reptile of this species stealthily wound its coils around him, unperceived till it was too late to escape. His cries brought his father quickly to the rescue, and he rushed forward, and seizing the anaconda boldly by the head, tore its jaws asunder. There appears to be no doubt that this formidable serpent grows to an enormous bulk, and lives to a great age, for Mr. Bates heard of specimens having been killed which measured forty-two feet in length. The natives of the Amazons country universally believe in the existence of a monster water-serpent, said to be many score fathoms in length, which appears successively in different parts of the river. They call it the Mai d'agoa-"the mother or spirit of the water." This fable, which was doubtless suggested by the occasional appearance of Sucurujus of unusually large size, takes a great variety of forms, and the wild legends form the subject of conversation amongst old and young, over the wood fires in lonely settlements.

One day that Mr. Bates was entomologising alone and unarmed, in a dry ygapo, where the trees were rather wide apart and the ground coated to the depth of eight or ten inches with dead leaves, he was near coming

into collision with a boa-constrictor. He had just entered a little thicket to capture an insect, and was pinning it, when he was startled by a rushing noise. He looked up to the sky, thinking a squall was coming on, but not a breath of wind stirred in the tree-tops. On stepping out of the bushes, he met face to face a huge serpent coming down a slope, and making the dry twigs crack and fly with his weight as he moved over them. He had frequently met with a smaller boa, the Cutim-boia, in a similar way, and knew from the habits of the family that there was no danger, so he stood his ground. On seeing him the reptile suddenly turned, and glided at an accelerated pace down the path. There was very little of the serpentine movement in his course. The rapidly-moving and shining body looked like a stream of brown liquid flowing over the thick bed of fallen leaves, rather than a serpent with skin of varied colours. The huge trunk of an uprooted tree lay across his road; this he glided over in his undeviating course, and soon after penetrated a dense swampy thicket, where Mr. Bates, who had set after him at first, says he did not care to follow him.

Adventures with alligators are not less amusing. One day, when out turtle fishing in the pools in the neighbourhood of Ega, when the net was formed into a circle, and the men had jumped in, an alligator was found to be enclosed. "No one," Mr. Bates says, "was alarmed, the only fear expressed being that the imprisoned beast would tear the net. First one shouted, 'I have touched his head;' then another, 'He has scratched my leg.' One of the men, a lanky Miranha, was thrown off his balance, and then there was no end to the laughter and shouting. At last a youth of about fourteen years of age, on my calling to him from the bank to do so, seized the reptile by the tail, and held him tightly, until, a little resistance being overcome, he was able to bring it ashore. The net was opened, and the boy slowly dragged the dangerous but cowardly beast to land through the muddy water, a distance of about one hundred yards. Meantime, I had cut a strong pole from a tree, and as soon as the alligator was drawn to solid ground, gave him a sharp rap with it on the crown of his head, which killed him instantly. It was a good-sized individual; the jaws being considerably more than a foot long, and fully capable of snapping a man's leg in twain." The species was the large cayman, the Jacaréuassu of the Amazonian Indians (Jacare nigra).

At another spot in the same neighbourhood no one could descend to bathe without being advanced upon by one or other of these hungry monsters. There was much offal cast into the river, and this, of course, attracted them to the place. "One day," Mr. Bates relates, "I amused myself by taking a basketful of fragments of meat beyond the line of ranchos, and drawing the alligators towards me by feeding them. They behaved pretty much as dogs do when fed; catching the bones I threw them in their huge jaws, and coming nearer and nearer, showing increased eagerness after every morsel. The enormous gape of their mouths, with their blood-red lining and long fringes of teeth, and the uncouth shape of their bodies, made a picture of unsurpassable ugliness. I once or twice fired a heavy charge of shot at them, aiming at the vulnerable part of their bodies, which is a small space situated behind their eyes, but this had no other effect than to make them give a hoarse grunt and shake themselves; they immediately afterwards turned to receive another bone which I threw to them."

TIME elapsed. Autumn weather had come; and things were going on in their state of progression at Prior's Ash, as things always must go on. Be it slow or fast, be it marked or unmarked, the stream of life must glide forward; onwards, onwards; never stopping, never turning from its appointed course that bears straight towards eternity.

In the events that concern us nothing had been very marked. At least, not outwardly. There were no startling changes to be recorded -unless, indeed, it was that noted change in the heart of the town. The bank of which you have heard so much was no more; but in its stead flourished an extensive ironmongery establishment-which it was to be hoped would not come to the same ignoble end. The house had been divided into two dwellings: the one, accessible by the former private entrance, was let to a quiet widow lady and her son, a young man reading for the Church; the other had been opened in all the grandeur and glory of highly-polished steel and iron. Grates, chimneypieces, fire-irons, fenders, scrapers, gilded lamps, ornamental gratings, and other useful things more puzzling to mention, crowded the front windows and dazzled the admiring eyes of the passers-by. You might have thought it was gold and silver displayed there, when the sun reflected its light on the shining wares and brought out their brilliancy. Not one of the Godolphins could pass it without a keen heart-pang, but the general public were content to congregate and admire, as long as the novelty lasted.

The great crash, which had so upset the equanimity of Prior's Ash, was beginning to be forgotten as a thing of the past. The bankruptcy was at an end-save for some remaining proceedings of form which did not concern the general public, and not much the creditors. Compassion for those who had been injured by the calamity was dying out: many a home had been rendered needy, many desolate; but outside people do not make these uncomfortable facts any lasting concern of theirs. There were only two who did make them so, in regard to Prior's Ash and they would make them so as long as their lives should last.

:

George Godolphin's wife was lying in her poor lodgings, and Thomas was dying at Ashlydyat. Dying so slowly and imperceptibly that the passage to the grave was smoothed, and the town began to say that he might recover yet. The wrong inflicted upon others, however unwillingly on his own part, the distress rife in many a house around, was ever present to him. It was ever present to Maria.