512 EXCURSIONS BEYOND EGA 



crown for the hire of a small boat and one man to dis- 

 embark from the steamer, a distance of lOO yards. 



In rambling over my old ground in the forests of the 

 neighbourhood, I found great changes had taken place — 

 to me, changes for the worse. The mantle of shrubs, 

 bushes, and creeping plants which formerly, when the 

 suburbs were undisturbed by axe or spade, had been 

 left free to arrange itself in rich, full and smooth sheets 

 and masses over the forest borders, had been nearly all 

 cut away, and troops of labourers were still employed 

 cutting ugly muddy roads for carts and cattle, through 

 the once clean and lonely woods. Houses and mills had 

 been erected on the borders of these new roads. The 

 noble forest-trees had been cut down, and their naked, 

 half-burnt stems remained in the midst of ashes, muddy 

 puddles, and heaps of broken branches. I was obliged 

 to hire a negro boy to show me the way to my favourite 

 path near Una, which I have described in the second 

 chapter of this narrative ; the new clearings having 

 quite obliterated the old forest roads. Only a few acres 

 of the glorious forest near Una now remained in their 

 natural state. On the other side of the city near the old 

 road to the rice mills, several scores of woodsmen were 

 employed under Government, in cutting a broad carriage- 

 road through the forest to Maranham, the capital of the 

 neighbouring province, distant 250 miles from Para, and 

 this had entirely destroyed the solitude of the grand old 

 forest path. In the course of a few years, however, a 

 new growth of creepers will cover the naked tree-trunks 

 on the borders of this new road, and luxuriant shrubs 

 form a green fringe to the path : it will then become as 

 beautiful a woodland road as the old one was. A natura- 

 list will have, henceforward, to go farther from the city 

 to find the glorious forest scenery which lay so near in 

 1848, and work much more laboriously than was formerly 

 needed, to make the large collections which Mr. Wallace 

 and I succeeded in doing in the neighbourhood of Para. 



June 2, 1859. — At length, on the second of June, I 

 left Para, probably for ever ; embarking in a North 

 American trading-vessel, the 'Frederick Demming', for 

 New York, the United States' route being the quickest 

 as well as the pleasantest way of reaching England. My 

 extensive private collections were divided into three 



