ith your simple gown and straw hat, you
are better dressed than any one of these Brazilians, with their headgear
and flying petticoats, which are foreign to their country and their
race."

"If it pleases you to think so," answered Minha, "I do not envy any of
them."

But they had come to see. They walked through the streets, which
contained more stalls than shops; they strolled about the market-place,
the rendezvous of the fashionable, who were nearly stifled in their
European clothes; they even breakfasted at an hotel--it was scarcely an
inn--whose cookery caused them to deeply regret the excellent service on
the raft.

After dinner, at which only turtle flesh, served up in different forms,
appeared, the Garral family went for the last time to admire the borders
of the lake as the setting sun gilded it with its rays; then they
rejoined their pirogue, somewhat disillusioned perhaps as to the
magnificence of a town which one hour would give time enough to visit,
and a little tired with walking about its stifling streets which were
not nearly so pleasant as the shady pathways of Iquitos. The inquisitive
Lina's enthusiasm alone had not been damped.

They all took their places in the pirogue. The wind remained in the
northwest, and had freshened with the evening. The sail was hoisted.
They took the same course as in the morning, across the lake fed by
the black waters of the Rio Teffe, which, according to the Indians, is
navigable toward the southwest for forty days' journey. At eight o'clock
the priogue regained the mooring-place and hailed the jangada.

As soon as Lina could get Fragoso aside--

"Have you seen anything suspicious?" she inquired.

"Nothing, Miss Lina," he replied; "Torres has scarcely left his cabin,
where he has been reading and writing."

"He did not get into the house or the dining-room, as I feared?"

"No, all the time he was not in his cabin he was in the bow of the
raft."

"And what was he doing?"

"Holding an old piece of paper in his hand, consulting it with great
attention, and muttering a lot of incomprehensible words."

"All that is not so unimportant as you think, Mr. Fragoso. These
readings and writings and old papers have their interest! He is neither
a professor nor a lawyer, this reader and writer!"

"You are right!"

"Still watch him, Mr. Fragoso!"

"I will watch him always, Miss Lina," replied Fragoso.

On the morrow, the 27th of July, at daybreak, Benito gave the pil