Tout à vous, L. AGASSIZ.[63] Although no longer on board an independent steamer, we are still the guests of the company, having government passages. Nothing can be more comfortable than the travelling on these Amazonian boats. They are clean and well kept, with good-sized state-rooms, which most persons use, however, only as dressing-rooms, since it is always more agreeable to sleep on the open deck in one’s hammock. The table is very well kept, the fare good, though not varied. Bread is the greatest deficiency, but hard biscuit makes a tolerable substitute. Our life is after this fashion. We turn out of our hammocks at dawn, go down stairs to make our toilets, and have a cup of hot coffee below. By this time the decks are generally washed and dried, the hammocks removed, and we can go above again. Between then and the breakfast hour, at half past ten o’clock, I generally study Portuguese, though my lessons are somewhat interrupted by watching the shore and the trees, a constant temptation when we are coasting along near the banks. At half past ten or eleven o’clock breakfast is served, and after that the glare of the sun becomes trying, and I usually descend to the cabin, where we make up our journals, and write during the middle of the day. At three o’clock I consider that the working hours are over, and then I take a book and sit in my lounging-chair on deck, and watch the scenery, and the birds and the turtles, and the alligators if there are any, and am lazy in a general way. At five o’clock dinner is served, (the meals being always on deck,) and after that begins the delight of the day. At that hour it grows deliciously cool, the sunsets are always beautiful, and we go to the forward deck and sit there till nine o’clock in the evening. Then comes tea, and then to our hammocks; I sleep in mine most profoundly till morning. To-day we stopped at a small station on the north side of the river called Barreira das Cudajas. The few houses stand on a bank of red drift, slightly stratified in some parts, and affording a support for the river-mud, shored up against it. Since then, in our progress, we have seen the same formation in several localities.