262 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 
dances around her, snapping bis fingers as if he were 
playing on castanets, and half encircling her with his 
arms, but she remains reserved and cold. Now and then 
they join together in something like a waltz, but this 
is only occasionally and for a moment. How different 
from the negro dances which we saw frequently in the 
neighborhood of Rio, and in which the advances generally 
come from the women, and are not always of the most 
modest character. The ball was gayer than ever at ten 
o'clock when I went to my room, or rather to the room 
where my hammock was slung, and which I shared with 
Indian women and children, with a cat and her family 
of kittens, who slept on the edge of my mosquito-net 
and made frequent inroads upon the inside, with hens 
and chickens and sundry dogs, who went in and out. 
The music and dancing, the laughter and talking outside, 
continued till the small hours. Every now and then an 
Indian girl would come in to rest for a while, take a nap 
in a hammock, and then return to the dance. When we 
first arrived in South America we could hardly have slept 
soundly under such circumstances ; but one soon becomes 
accustomed,- on the Amazons, to sleeping in rooms with 
mud floors and mud walls, or with no walls at all, where 
rats and birds and bats rustle about in the thatch over- 
head, and all sorts of unwonted noises in the night suggest 
that you are by no means the sole occupant of your apart- 
ment. There is one thing, however, which makes it far 
pleasanter to lodge in the houses of the Indians here than 
in those of our poorer class at home. One is quite indepen- 
dent in the matter of bedding ; nobody travels without 
his own hammock, and the net which in many places is a 
necessity on account of the mosquitoes. Beds and bedding 
