Chap. III. 
MASQUERADING. 
205 
covered with old cloth dyed or painted and shaped 
according to the object represented. Some of the 
imitations which I saw were capital. One ingenious 
fellow arranged an old piece of canvas in the form of a 
tapir, placed himself under it, and crawled about on all 
fours. He constructed an elastic nose to resemble that 
of the tapir, and made, before the doors of the principal 
residents, such a good imitation of the beast grazing, 
that peals of laughter greeted him wherever he went. 
Another man walked about solitarily, masked as a 
jabiru crane (a large animal standing about four feet 
high), and mimicked the gait and habits of the bird 
uncommonly well. One year an Indian lad imitated 
me, to the infinite amusement of the townsfolk. He 
came the previous day to borrow of me an old blouse 
and straw hat. I felt rather taken in when I saw him, 
on the night of the performance, rigged out as an ento- 
mologist, with an insect net, hunting bag, and pincushion. 
To make the imitation complete, he had borrowed the 
frame of an old pair of spectacles, and went about 
with it straddled over his nose. The jaguar now and 
then made a raid amongst the crowd of boys who were 
dressed as deer, goats, and so forth. The masquers kept 
generally together, moving from house to house, and 
the performances were directed by an old musician, who 
sang the orders and explained to the spectators what 
was going forward in a kind of recitative, accompanying 
himself on a wire guitar. The mixture of Portuguese 
and Indian customs is partly owing to the European 
immigrants in these parts having been uneducated men, 
who, instead of introducing European civilisation, have 
