he Missions on
very primitive looms, give quite a stately, classical appearance to the
numerous groups round the fires. Such must have been the aspect
presented by the halting-places of those daring seafarers, the
Phoenicians, who were the first to call into life an international
commerce, and whose light-rigged barques first ventured to distant
shores, to bring home the precious amber and the useful tin. Only the
dense swarms of mosquitoes, which set in immediately after sunset,
remind us rather unpleasantly that we are far off from those happy
northern regions, where such a nuisance can hardly be well imagined.
Especially in the dense forest beneath cacao-bushes, or under the
close leafage of the large figueiras, where no breath of air incommodes
those light-winged tormentors, it is quite impossible, for the European
at least, to close an eye without the shelter of a mosquiteiro
(mosquito-net); and we could but wonder at our Indians, most of whom did
without it. After supper they simply spread a hide on the ground, on
which, with no covering other than the starry firmament above them,
they slept undisturbed till the dawn, only occasionally brushing away,
as if by way of diversion, the most obtrusive of the little fiends. The
capitanos only, and one or other of the older rowers, allow themselves
the luxury of good cotton hammocks, which are also made by their wives
in the Missions.

Such, with few variations, was the course of our daily life, until we
reached the regions of the rapids, when, of course, the hundred little
incidents connected with the dragging of the canoes through narrow,
foaming channels, and with carrying the goods and the vessels themselves
overland, disturbed the monotony of this rude forest life.

BESIEGED BY PECCARIES.

JAMES W. WELLS.

[It is to "Three Thousand Miles through Brazil, from Rio de
Janeiro to Maranhao," by James W. Wells, F.R.G.S., that we
owe the following exciting example of the perils of a hunter's
life in the wilds of the tropics. Mr. Wells and his
fellow-travellers, while journeying up the valley of the Sapao,
far in interior Brazil, came upon traces of the peccary, an
animal which, from its fearlessness, and its habit of moving in
troops, is occasionally a very unsafe creature to meet. What
followed we shall leave the author to tell.]

We were down in the deep, narrow valley, where the slopes of the
table-land surround