262 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 



dances around her, snapping his 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 



