Cuap. VIL VILLA NOVA. 149 
extreme. The wet season, from February to June, had been very 
severe, and the waters had risen to their highest point. It took us, in 
the months of June and July, in a well-manned vessel, fourteen days 
to ascend from Santarem, a distance of only tro miles. The currents 
were very strong ; all the low lands were flooded, and great portions of 
land planted with cacao on the coast of Obydos were swept away. At 
Villa Nova it was very hot, gleamy, and showery up to the end of 
August. The welcome dry winds then set in, and lasted until the 2oth 
of November, by which time the river had receded to its lowest level. 
At that date commenced a series of heavy rains, which continued, how- 
ever, only nine days; but the weather remained showery to the end of 
the year. On the 3rd of January a kind of second summer began, and . 
this was a most delightful time. The vegetation which had become 
parched up in November had been freshened by the showery weather 
of December, and the open places were covered with a carpet of 
the brightest verdure. The marly and sandy terrace-formed beaches 
were clothed with a great diversity of flowering shrubs. Birds and 
insects were far more numerous and active than they had been before. 
A species of swallow of a brown colour, with a short square tail (Cotyle), 
then made its appearance in great numbers, and built its nests in holes 
of the bank on which the village is built, trilling forth in the mornings 
and evenings a short but sweet song. The east wind recommenced. 
It blew at first gently, but increased in strength daily as the dryness 
augmented : and with it came a dense fog, a rare phenomenon in this 
country, but which I found to be of regular occurrence in the central 
parts of the Lower Amazons when the dry season was much prolonged. 
For three successive weeks the daily order of the weather was almost 
uniform. The mornings dawned with a clear sky, a stiff breeze blowing 
and tossing the waters into billows, searching through our dwellings, 
and communicating a healthful exhilarating glow to the body. As the 
sun ascended, a light mistiness crept along the lower strata of the atmo- 
sphere ; after midday this increased in density, until an hour before 
sunset the sun became obscured, and no longer produced that sickening 
heat which at all other times was so depressing in the late hours of 
afternoon. An hour or two after sunset the mist cleared away, and the 
nights were starlit and deliciously cool. Every day the fog increased 
in amount, until at the beginning of February a thick moist veil en- 
veloped the whole landscape both night and day. The wind then 
increased to a gale ; every sailing craft on the river was obliged to seek 
shelter ; and when the monthly river steamer, a vessel of four hundred 
tons burthen, anchored in the port, it pitched up and down as I have 
seen ships do in breezy weather in the Southampton Water. This 
lasted three days, at the end of which the wind suddenly lulled, black 
clouds gathered in the east, the fog lifted up like a curtain, and down 
came the deluging rain which inaugurates the wet season. 
I made, in this second visit to Villa Nova, an extensive collection of 
the natural productions of the neighbourhood. A fewremarks on some 
of the more interesting of these must suffice. The forests are very 
different in their general character from those of Parad, and in fact 
