uld perhaps be added the Carmelite
Convent, burned down in 1850, of which only the ruins remain. The
population of Manaos does not exceed the number above given, and after
reckoning the public officials and soldiers, is principally made of up
Portuguese and Indian merchants belonging to the different tribes of the
Rio Negro.

Three principal thoroughfares of considerable irregularity run through
the town, and they bear names highly characteristic of the tone of
thought prevalent in these parts--God-the-Father Street, God-the-Son
Street, and God-the-Holy Ghost Street!

In the west of the town is a magnificent avenue of centenarian orange
trees which were carefully respected by the architects who out of the
old city made the new. Round these principal thoroughfares is interwoven
a perfect network of unpaved alleys, intersected every now and then by
four canals, which are occasionally crossed by wooden bridges. In a few
places these iguarapes flow with their brownish waters through large
vacant spaces covered with straggling weeds and flowers of startling
hues, and here and there are natural squares shaded by magnificent
trees, with an occasional white-barked sumaumeira shooting up, and
spreading out its large dome-like parasol above its gnarled branches.

The private houses have to be sought for among some hundreds of
dwellings, of very rudimentary type, some roofed with tiles, others with
interlaced branches of the palm-tree, and with prominent miradors, and
projecting shops for the most part tenanted by Portuguese traders.

And what manner of people are they who stroll on to the fashionable
promenade from the public buildings and private residences? Men of good
appearance, with black cloth coats, chimney-pot hats, patent-leather
boots, highly-colored gloves, and diamond pins in their necktie bows;
and women in loud, imposing toilets, with flounced dressed and headgear
of the latest style; and Indians, also on the road to Europeanization
in a way which bids fair to destroy every bit of local color in this
central portion of the district of the Amazon!

Such is Manaos, which, for the benefit of the reader, it was necessary
to sketch. Here the voyage of the giant raft, so tragically interrupted,
had just come to a pause in the midst of its long journey, and here will
be unfolded the further vicissitudes of the mysterious history of the
fazender of Iquitos.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST MOMENTS

SCARCELY HAD the piro