NOTES ON BRAZIL. 



195 



which they lived, and was never without money in the drawer. Return- 

 ing into the house with one or two of the guests from an attendance on 

 the horses, he caught her last words, opened his repository with great 

 self-complacency, and displayed a considerable quantity of doubloons, 

 proclaiming himself a fool, for having formerly squandered so many 

 away. The children were all grown up, and with seemingly more of 

 their mother's temperament than of his, heard his noise without alarm, 

 and were little terrified by his fury. Some young men, who had come 

 in the afternoon, to enjoy the Intrudo with his family, incautiously 

 oiFended him, and he seized an axe, with which he seemed on the point 

 of dashing put the brains of one of them ; yet this occasioned no inter- 

 ruption of their gambols, but only made them careful to keep out of the 

 reach of his axm. 



However the peculiarities of this man may render him unfit to be 

 produced as a specimen of the Peasants in the neighbourhood of St. 

 Pedro, a description of his house may serve as a picture of the habitations 

 of the lower order of Farmers, not in this Province alone, but in the 

 whole space from the Parana to the Ocean. It was constructed of a 

 frame-work of wood, to which upright studs were fastened by pegs, or 

 twigs of a plant here called Sipo, Avhich grows in abundance over the 

 whole country, bears twisting well, and firmly binds together the con- 

 stituent parts of a building. Between these studs other twigs are inter- 

 woven, and the spaces filled up with well-tempered clay, dashed in and 

 pressed and smoothed by the hand alone. The walls are rough ; but in 

 general, made somewhat more seemly by whitewashing. The thatch is 

 of a coarse flaggy grass, the floors of earth, and the apartments without 

 chimneys. In Brazil, the door made of plank forms the legal 

 distinction between a house and a resting place, — a permanent and a 

 temporary abode; the latter sometimes having a door made of straw 

 twisted round sticks, or of a hide stretched over a slight piece of 

 fi-ame work. Such doors are common in the newly-acquired Provinces, 

 but not in Rio Grande. The lodging-rooms of the house in question 

 were on the ground floor, divided from the other apartments by the same 

 kind of wall as is described before, but of a slighter texture. The 



B B 2 



