NOTES ON BRAZIL. 



357 



water, knowing by experience, that the deer never run up the mountains, 

 if they can avoid it. When they find a small open space, with tracks 

 leading through it, they sit down and listen to the dogs, which are 

 turned into the upper ground and always give mouth when they find 

 the game. As the herd approaches the place of waiting, the interest 

 becomes great and some activity is required ; for if a single stag makes 

 his appearance among the bushes, he must be instantly shot or he escapes 

 and is seen no more. If many happen to present themselves, there is 

 some temporary bustle in the scene ; but I am not sufficiently disciplined 

 to sit patiently, it may be a whole day, listening to the distant barking 

 of dogs, with the probability too, that some accident will deprive us of 

 the game, or that the Indians, or some countrymen scarcely more civiliz- 

 ed, may track it when wounded, and finally carry it off". 



Returning from this visit to the Orende, I was gratified with a com- 

 paratively diminutive exhibition of a scene, which not unfrequently 

 occurs on a grander scale, and of which I had often wished to be a spec- 

 tator. Fire had seized upon an adjoining forest, and devoured about 

 half a league square of it. Being to windward, and not incommoded 

 by the smoke, I approached as near as the heat would allow me, 

 or the embers suffer a well - broken horse to advance, It is not 

 in my power, however, to communicate more than a very faint 

 idea of the sublime picture. I was in the midst of several hundred 

 Stems, as large as the middle-sized British oak, all black and smoking, 

 from whose smouldering remnants continually fell half-consumed 

 branches, and smaller pieces of charred wood, which, broken and break- 

 ing others in their fall, formed a shower of sparks, rendered vivid by 

 their passage through the air. The ground was covered with these 

 charred arms, with embers, and Avith ashes, whence arose small spiracles 

 of grey smoke, as if escaping through crevices from an immense furnace, 

 hidden and burning beneath. At some little distance in front, the fire 

 raged in all its fury ; from the burning underwood the flames rushed 

 upwards in large sheets, which expired in the air, or seizing the dried 

 leaves of those monarchs of the forest, which had defied all former storms; 



