ke you fancy that
we had never left Iquitos!"

"Do just as you like, Minha," replied Joam Garral, smiling in the sad
way he often did.

"That will be nice!"

"I leave everything to your good taste."

"And that will do us honor, father. It ought to, for the sake of the
splendid country we are going through--which is yours, by the way, and
into which you are to enter after so many years' absence."

"Yes, Minha; yes," replied Joam. "It is rather as if we were returning
from exile--voluntary exile! Do your best; I approve beforehand of what
you do."

On Minha and Lina, to whom were added of their own free will Manoel on
the one side and Fragoso on the other, devolved the care of decorating
the inside of the house. With some imagination and a little artistic
feeling the result was highly satisfactory.

The best furniture of the fazenda naturally found its place within,
as after arriving in Para they could easily return it by one of the
_igariteos_. Tables, bamboo easy-chairs, cane sofas, carved wood
shelves, everything that constituted the charming furniture of the
tropics, was disposed with taste about the floating home. No one is
likely to imagine that the walls remained bare. The boards were hidden
beneath hangings of most agreeable variety. These hangings were made
of valuable bark, that of the _"tuturis,"_ which is raised up in large
folds like the brocades and damasks and softest and richest materials
of our modern looms. On the floors of the rooms were jaguar skins, with
wonderful spots, and thick monkey furs of exquisite fleeciness. Light
curtains of the russet silk, produced by the _"sumauma,"_ hung from the
windows. The beds, enveloped in mosquito curtains, had their pillows,
mattresses, and bolsters filled with that fresh and elastic substance
which in the Upper Amazon is yielded by the bombax.

Throughout on the shelves and side-tables were little odds and ends,
brought from Rio Janeiro or Belem, those most precious to Minha being
such as had come from Manoel. What could be more pleasing in her eyes
than the knickknacks given by a loving hand which spoke to her without
saying anything?

In a few days the interior was completed, and it looked just like the
interior of the fazenda. A stationary house under a lovely clump of
trees on the borders of some beautiful river! Until it descended between
the banks of the larger stream it would not be out of keeping with the
picturesque landscape which stretched