6 TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON. \JMne, 
of the churches and public buildings are very handsome, 
but decay and incongruous repairs have injured some 
of them, and bits of gardens and waste ground in- 
tervening between the houses, fenced in with rotten 
palings, and filled with rank weeds and a few banana- 
plants, look strange and unsightly to a European eye. 
The squares and public places are picturesque, either 
from the churches and pretty houses which surround 
them, or from the elegant palms of various species, 
which with the plantain and banana everywhere occur ; 
but they bear more resemblance to village-greens than 
to parts of a great city. A few paths lead across 
them in different directions through a tangled vegeta- 
tion of weedy cassias, shrubby convolvuli, and the pretty 
orange-flowered Asclepias curassavica ,- — plants which 
here take the place of the rushes, docks, and nettles of 
England. The principal street, the '' Rua dos Merca- 
dores’' (Street of Merchants), "contains almost the only 
good shops in the city. The houses are many of them 
only one story high, but the shops, which are often com- 
pletely open in front, are very neatly and attractively 
furnished, though with rather a miscellaneous assortment 
of articles. Here are seen at intervals a few yards of 
foot-paving, though so little as only to render the rest 
of your walk over rough stones or deep sand more un- 
pleasant by comparison. The other streets are all very 
narrow. They consist either of very rough stones, appa- 
rently the remains of the original paving, which has 
never been repaired, or of deep sand and mud-holes. 
The houses are irregular and low, mostly built of a coarse 
ferruginous sandstone, common in the neighbourhood, 
