RIO DE JANEIRO AND ITS ENVIRONS. 71 
f 
ing, while the orange orchards are golden with fruit, and 
flowers are everywhere. We had little time to hecome 
acquainted with the beauty of the place, which we hope to 
explore more at our leisure on some future visit, for sunrise 
the next morning saw us on our road again. The soft 
clouds hanging over the tops of the mountains were just 
tinged with the first rays of the sun when we drove out 
of the town on the top of the diligence, the mules at 
full gallop, the guard sounding a gay reveille as we rattled 
over the little bridge and past the pretty houses where 
closed windows and doors showed that the 'inhabitants were 
hardly yet astir. 
The first part of our road lay through the lovely valley of 
the Piabanha, the river whose acquaintance we had already 
made in Petropolis, and which accompanied us for the first 
forty or fifty miles of our journey, sometimes a restless 
stream broken into rapids and cascades, sometimes spread- 
ing into a broad, placid river, but always enclosed between 
mountains rising occasionally to the height of a few thou- 
sand feet, lifting here and there a bare rocky face seamed 
with a thousand scars of time and studded with Brornelias 
and Orchids, but more often clothed with all the glory of 
the Southern forest, or covered from base to summit with 
coffee shrubs. A thriving coffee plantation is a very pretty 
sight ; the rounded, regular outline of the shrubs gives a 
tufted look to the hillside on which they grow, and their 
glittering foliage contrasts strikingly at this season with 
their bright red berries. One often passes coffee planta- 
tions, however, which look ragged and thin ; in this case 
the trees are either suffering from the peculiar insect so 
injurious to them, (a kind of Tinea,) or have run out 
and become exhausted. As we drove along, the scenes 
