A SHADY GLEN 



501 



me an opportunity of giving a few further instances of the 

 excellent qualities of free negroes in a country where 

 they are not wholly condemned to a degrading position 

 by the pride or hatred of the white race. This old woman 

 was born a slave, but like many others in the large towns 

 of Brazil, she had been allowed to trade on her own ac- 

 count, as market-women, paying a fixed sum daily to her 

 owner, and keeping for herself all her surplus gains. In 

 a few years she had saved sufficient money to purchase 

 her freedom, and that of her grown-up son. This done, 

 the old lady continued to strive until she had earned 

 enough to buy the house in which she lived, a consider- 

 able property situated in one of the principal streets. 

 When I returned from the interior, after seven years* 

 absence from Para, I found she was still advancing in 

 prosperity, entirely through her own exertions (being a 

 widow) and those of her son, who continued, with the 

 most regular industry, his trade as blacksmith, and was 

 now building a number of small houses on a piece of 

 unoccupied land attached to her property. I found these 

 and many other free negroes most trustworthy people, 

 and admired the constancy of their friendships and the 

 gentleness and cheerfulness of their manners towards each 

 other. They showed great disinterestedness in their 

 dealings with me, doing me many a piece of service 

 without a hint at remuneration ; but this may have 

 been partly due to the name of Englishman, the know- 

 ledge of our national generosity towards the African 

 race being spread far and wide amongst the Brazilian 

 negroes. 



I remained at St. Paulo five months ; five years would 

 not have been sufficient to exhaust the treasures of its 

 neighbourhood in Zoology and Botany. Although now 

 a forest-rambler of ten years* experience, the beautiful 

 forest which surrounds this settlement gave me as much 

 enjoyment as if I had only just landed for the first time 

 in a tropical country. The Zoology revealed plainly the 

 nearer proximity of the locality to the eastern slopes of 

 the Andes than any I had yet visited, by the first ap- 

 pearance of many of the peculiar and richly-coloured 

 forms (especially of insects), which are known only as 

 inhabitants of the warm and moist valleys of New Granada 

 and Peru. The plateau on which the village is built ex- 

 tends on one side nearly a mile into the forest, but on the 



