TO CAPE FRIO. 



59 



' Tiririca is a considerable sugar-refinery, and very pleasantly situ- 

 ated. The manufactory lies at the foot of a green hill, on the summit of 

 which stands the house of the proprietor, encircled by about twenty 

 small huts for his servants and negro slaves. The large sugar plan- 

 tations surround the fazenda ; beyond these are thick lofty woods ; 

 and just before the manufactory lies a marshy piece of meadow 

 ground, with ponds frequented by numbers of wild fowl, which we 

 could shoot from the windows. After breakfasting the next morning 

 with our obliging host, we dispersed in the woods. Mr. SelloM- 

 and myself crossed the sugar-plantations, and passing some other 

 fazendas, which are surrounded by orange-groves, penetrated into 

 one of those solemn primeval forests, which during my stay in the 

 Brazils always afforded me the highest gratification. Lofty dead 

 trunks of trees on the margin of this wood, bore evidence of the fire 

 by which the neighbouring country had been prepared for cultivation. 

 The forest itself was a dark wilderness of ancient trees of colossal 

 magnitude, composed of the mimosa, lignum vita;, bomba, bignonia, and 

 others, which as usual, were attended by a number of parasite plants, 

 such as bromelia, epidendrum,, passiftora, bauhinia, banisteria. Sec. the 

 climbing stems of which are rooted in the ground, while their leaves 

 and flowers occupy only the highest summits of their supporters ; they 

 cannot therefore be examined without cutting down one of those gi- 

 gantic monarchs of the forest, the extreme hardness of whose wood 

 often defies the sharpest axe. 



Among these creeping plants, a bauhinia is very remarkable : its 

 strong woody branches always grow in alternate arcs of circles ; the 

 concavity of each arc is as artificially hollowed, as if the gauging 

 chisel of a statuary had been employed for the purpose, and on the 

 opposite convex side is a short blunt thorn. This singular plant, 

 which might easily be mistaken for a production of art, climbs into 

 the tops of the highest trees. Its leaf is small and bilobed ; but 



