FRIDAY, JAN. 2. A Brazilian lady was pointed out to me to-day who is but twelve years of age, and who has two children, who were frolicking around her steps. She was married at ten to a wealthy merchant of sixty-five,—a spring violet caught in a curling snow-drift! But ladies here marry extremely young. They have hardly done with their fictitious babies, when they have the smiles and tears of real ones. Their parents make the matches, as well they may at that age; and they ought in conscience to retain still the spanking privilege, and exercise it down to the third generation. The evidences of consideration here turn upon a two or four wheeled vehicle, which is kept in the basement story of the house, and throws the sheen of its varnish on the eye of the passer. Whether there is a horse to draw it or not, is a matter of comparatively little importance. It answers its essential purpose without. It is a quiet indication of rank, and all the better that its slumber is seldom broken. In the parlors and apartments above, you find the transmitted furniture of past generations. Antiquity has a charm against which novelty cannot prevail. The same chair in which the departed ancestor trembled between this life and the next, still stands by the verandah, where budding beauty breathes and throbs. The same old harp, which was swept by a hand that has long since forgotten its cunning, now wakes to melody under the touch of one in whom life’s earliest pulses play. Its music ever floats between the cradle and the grave. SATURDAY, JAN. 3. This is a holiday at Rio, and the calkers from shore, who are at work on our frigate, knocked off last evening, refusing to come this morning unless their per diem should be raised fifty per cent. As we are anxious to get to sea, their demand has been complied with. Conscience, it would seem, has no concern in the matter, though it is a saint’s day, and one of the most sacred in their calendar. How very convenient when that little inward troubler can be tied up in a man’s purse, and stowed away in his breeches pocket! Rio is a city without chimneys, and strikes one as a regiment of soldiers without caps. A vein of smoke is never seen circling up over its red-tiled roofs. The mildness of the climate dispenses with all parlor fires, except the gleam of the braséro. The houses, which rarely exceed two stories, are built of fragmented stones and a species of mortar, which the air indurates into the solidity of a cement. The parlors are in the second story, and open out on a verandah. The servants divide the ground-floor with the old spaniel, who looks out from the dusky background like the lion of Agamemnon, still keeping stern watch over his master’s gloomy shrine.