EIO DE JANEIRO AND ITS ENVIRONS. 



71 



ing, while the orange orchards are golden with fruit, and 

 flowers are everywhere. We had little time to become 

 acquainted with the beauty of the place, which we. hope to 

 explore more at our leisure on some future visit, for sunrise 

 the next morning saw us on our road again. The soft 

 clouds hanging over the tops of the mountains were just 

 tinged with the first rays of the sun when we drove out 

 of the town on the top of the diligence, the mules at 

 full gallop, the guard sounding a gay reveille as we rattled 

 over the little bridge and past the pretty houses where 

 closed windows and doors showed that the inhabitants were 

 hardly yet astir. 



The first part of our road lay through the lovely valley of 

 the Piabanha, the river whose acquaintance we had already 

 made in Petropolis, and which accompanied us for the first 

 forty or fifty miles of our journey, sometimes a restless 

 stream broken into rapids and cascades, sometimes spread- 

 ing into a broad, placid river, but always enclosed between 

 mountains rising occasionally to the height of a few thou- 

 sand feet, lifting here and there a bare rocky face seamed 

 with a thousand scars of time and studded with Bromelias 

 and Orchids, but more often clothed with all the glory of 

 the Southern forest, or covered from base to summit with 

 coffee shrubs. A thriving coffee plantation is a very pretty 

 sight ; the rounded, regular outline of the shrubs gives a 

 tufted look to the hillside on which they grow, and their 

 glittering foliage contrasts strikingly at this season with 

 their bright red berries. One often passes coffee planta- 

 tions, however, which look ragged and thin ; in this case 

 the trees are either suffering from the peculiar insect so 

 injurious , to them, (a kind of Tinea,) or have run out 

 and become exhausted. As we drove along, the scenes 



