Chap. III. MASQUERADING. 205 



covered with old cloth dyed or painted and shaped 

 according to the object represented. Some of the 

 imitations which I saw were capital. One ingenious 

 fellow arranged an old piece of canvas in the form of a 

 tapir, placed himself under it, and crawled about on all 

 fours. He constructed an elastic nose to resemble that 

 of the tapir, and made, before the doors of the principal 

 residents, such a good imitation of the beast grazing, 

 that peals of laughter greeted him wherever he went. 

 Another man walked about solitarily, masked as a 

 jabirii crane (a large animal standing about four feet 

 high), and mimicked the gait and habits of the bird 

 uncommonly well. One year an Indian lad imitated 

 me, to the infinite amusement of the townsfolk. He 

 came the previous day to borrow of me an old blouse 

 and straw hat. I felt rather taken in when I saw him, 

 on the night of the performance, rigged out as an ento- 

 mologist, with an insect net, hunting bag, and pincushion. 

 To make the imitation complete, he had borrowed the 

 frame of an old pair of spectacles, and went about 

 with it straddled over his nose. The jaguar now and 

 then made a raid amongst the crowd of boys who were 

 dressed as deer, goats, and so forth. The masquers kept 

 generally together, moving- from house to house, and 

 the performances were directed by an old musician, who 

 sang the orders and explained to the spectators what 

 was going forward in a kind of recitative, accompanying 

 himself on a wire guitar. The mixture of Portuguese 

 and Indian customs is partly owing to the European 

 immigrants in these parts having been uneducated men, 

 who, instead of introducing European civilisation, have 



