The first part of our road lay through the lovely valley of the Piabanha, the river whose acquaintance we had already made in Petropolis, and which accompanied us for the first forty or fifty miles of our journey, sometimes a restless stream broken into rapids and cascades, sometimes spreading into a broad, placid river, but always enclosed between mountains rising occasionally to the height of a few thousand feet, lifting here and there a bare rocky face seamed with a thousand scars of time and studded with Bromelias and Orchids, but more often clothed with all the glory of the Southern forest, or covered from base to summit with coffee shrubs. A thriving coffee plantation is a very pretty sight; the rounded, regular outline of the shrubs gives a tufted look to the hillside on which they grow, and their glittering foliage contrasts strikingly at this season with their bright red berries. One often passes coffee plantations, however, which look ragged and thin; in this case the trees are either suffering from the peculiar insect so injurious to them, (a kind of Tinea,) or have run out and become exhausted. As we drove along, the scenes upon the road were often as amusing as they were picturesque. Now we came upon a troop of pack mules with a _tropeiro_ (driver) at their head; if a large troop, they were divided into companies of eight, with a man to guide each company. The guard wound his horn to give warning of our coming, and a general struggle, garnished with kicks, oaths, and many lashes, ensued, to induce the mules to make way for the coach. These troops of mules are beginning to disappear from the seaboard since the modern improvements in railroads and stage lines, making transportation so much easier; but until lately it was the only way of bringing down the produce from the interior. Or again we fell in with a line of country wagons made of plaited bamboo, a kind of fabric which is put to a variety of uses here, such as the building of fences and lining of ceilings or roofs, as well as the construction of carts. Here and there the laborers were sitting in groups at the roadside, their work suspended while they cooked their midday meal, their kettles hanging over the fire, their coffee-pot simmering over the coals, and they themselves lying about in gypsy-like freedom of attitude.