OUR LIFE AT RIO DE JANEIRO. 185 



painfully clear sky, which once seen must long remain im- 

 printed in the mind's eye. 



Rua Farani 12, Botafogo. 

 June 2. — We moved up here to-day, and I am really 

 delighted with the house. It is at the end of a street, some 

 three hundred yards long, placed at right angles to the Bay 

 of Botafogo,* and is on the side of a hill, Morro da Boa 

 Vista (485 feet), one of the ridges of the Corcovado. This 

 house used to be an hotel,t is of one story, and approached 

 from the street by three flights of steps. There are two 

 terraces on each- side of the building, with gardens and 

 fountains on each terrace, orange trees and kitchen gardens 

 on the lower, huge palm trees and exotic shrubs and 

 flowers on the higher, which is on the same level as the 

 house. On the latter are also grottos and seats of the 

 true Pompeian fashion ; while above them and behind the 

 house rises the hill, covered with glorious virgin forest, 

 wherein pretty marmosets play about, and the garden is 

 always full of lovely butterflies, some of which (Ageronia 

 Feronid) have a marvellous protective colouring, which 

 one would not dream of until one sees them raising and 

 flattening their wings in the sunshine on the huge lichen- 

 covered trunks of the grand palm trees. In front of the 

 house are two immense mango trees, their branches one 

 mass of lichens, especially one hanging species {Ramalina 

 implectd), sometimes two or three feet long, of a green-grey 

 colour. It is a curious fact that though the mango trees 

 are so plentiful and of an excessively large growth in Rio 

 de Janeiro, they produce very little fruit. 



* The word means " thrown into the fire," and alludes to the fearful autos 

 da fe, when the poor natives, on refusing to be converted to the Roman 

 Catholic religion, were committed by the priests to the flames. 



t It is now (January, 1886) once more an hotel. 



