t be alarmed at the snakes, and
scorpions, and centipedes! We shall find a cure for every bite--an
antidote for every bane.

Our new journey shall have its pleasures and advantages. Remember how of
old we shivered as we slept, coiled up in the corner of our dark log-hut
and smothered in skins,--now we shall swing lightly in our netted
hammocks under the gossamer leaves of the palm-tree, or the feathery
frondage of the ferns. Then we gazed upon leaden skies, and at night
looked upon the cold constellation of the Northern Bear;--now, we shall
have over us an azure canopy, and shall nightly behold the sparkling
glories of the Southern Cross, still shining as bright as when Paul and
his little Virginia with loving eyes gazed upon it from their island
home. In our last journey we toiled over bleak and barren wastes, across
frozen lakes, and marshes, and rivers;--now we shall pass under the
shadows of virgin forests, and float lightly upon the bosom of broad
majestic streams, whose shores echo with the voices of living nature.

Hitherto our travels have been upon the wide, open prairie, the
trackless plain of sand, the frozen lake, the thin scattering woods of
the North, or the treeless snow-clad "Barrens." Now we are about to
enter a great forest,--a forest where the leaves never fade, where the
flowers are always in bloom,--a forest where the woodman's axe has not
yet echoed, where the colonist has hardly hewed out a single
clearing,--a vast primeval forest,--the largest in the world.

How large, do you ask? I can hardly tell you. Are you thinking of Epping
or the New Forest? True, these are large woods, and have been larger at
one time. But if you draw your ideas of a great forest from either of
these you must prepare yourselves for a startling announcement--and that
is, that the forest through which I am going to take you is _as big as
all Europe_! There is one place where a straight line might be drawn
across this forest that would measure the enormous length of two
thousand six hundred miles! And there is a point in it from which a
circle might be described, with a diameter of more than a thousand
miles, and the whole area included within the vast circumference would
be found covered with an unbroken forest!

I need scarce tell you what forest I allude to, for there is none other
in the world of such dimensions--none to compare with that vast,
trackless forest that covers the valley of the mighty Amazon!

And what