20 SCENEKY ON THE EIVEK. Book I. 
a plantain garden of half an acre, was the only improve- 
ment of the kind in an extent of more than a hundred miles. 
With this single exception, and with that of the site of the 
old castle of San Juan, more generally known by the popu- 
lar name of the Castillo Viejo, the banks were covered 
with trees to the water's edge, their branches often bearing 
a vegetation of vines, climbers, and parasites, so densely 
interwoven that the whole appeared like a solid wall of 
leaves and flowers. 
•I shall never forget the impressions of one night and 
morning on this river. Our boat had anchored in the 
midst of the stream. Strange forms of trees, spectre-like 
in the dark, stood before us, and seemed to move as the 
eye strove in vain to make out their real shape. From 
time to time a splash in the water, caused by the movement 
of an alligator, the bellowing of a manati, the screeching of a 
night-bird, or the roar of some beast of the forest, broke the 
silence, and mingled at last with my feverish dream. In 
the morning, a song our boatmen addressed to the Virgin 
roused me from my sleep. It was a strain of plaintive 
notes in a few simple but most expressive modulations. 
Several years later I heard them again, sung by the Mex- 
can miners in the subterraneous chapel of the quicksilver 
mine of New Almaden in California, and I never shall 
forget the deep emotion felt on both occasions, so widely 
different in every other respect. In the latter case the 
scene passed in a narrow excavation before a little altar 
cut out of the natural rock, on which, before a gilded 
image of the Virgin, two thin tallow candles were casting 
their scanty light over the dark forms of fifteen or twenty 
men calling down the blessing of Heaven upon their day's 
work in the interior of the mountain — in the former, it 
was in the brightness and splendour of a morning of which 
