154 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 
tree which mot?t immediately strikes the eye, and stands 
out from the mass of green with wonderful grace and 
majesty, is the lofty, slender Assai palm, with its crown 
of light plume-like leaves, and its bunches of berry-like 
fruit, hanging from a branch that shoots out almost hori- 
zontally, just below the leaves. Houses on the shore 
break the solitude here and there. From this distance 
they look picturesque, with thatched, overhanging roofs, 
covering a kind of open porch. Just now we passed a 
cleared nook at the water-side, where a wooden cross 
marked a single mound. What a lonely grave it seemed ! 
We are now coasting along the Isle of Marajo, keeping up 
the so-called Parti river ; we shall not enter the undisputed 
waters of the Amazons till the day after to-morrow. This 
part of the river goes also by the name of the Bay of Marajo. 
August 21 st. Last evening we stopped at our first sta- 
tion,- -the little town of Breves. Its population, like that 
of all these small settlements on the Lower Amazons, is 
made up of an amalgamation of races. You see the regu- 
lar features and fair skin of the white man combined with 
the black, coarse, straight hair of the Indian, or the mulatto 
with partly negro, partly Indian features, but the crisp taken 
out of the hair ; and with these combinations comes in the 
pure Indian type, with its low brow, square build of face, 
and straight line of the shoulders. In the women especially 
the shoulders are rather high. In the first house we en- 
tered there was only an old half-breed Indian woman, stand- 
ing in the broad open porch of her thatched home, where 
she seemed to be surrounded with live stock, parrots and 
parroquets of all sorts and sizes, which she kept for sale. 
After looking in at several of the houses, buying one or two 
monkeys, some parroquets, and some articles of the village 
