Sometimes in summer evenings when the sun was about to set, and a freshening spirit breathed upon the reviving sense, Sebastian and Kara Aziek would sit under the flowery porch of their dwelling, and delight themselves with the joyous scene. The village, with its white buildings, (each surrounded by cultivated ground) afforded a smiling prospect: its simple inhabitants released from labour, were collected under the shade of their trees, observing the sports of their children, as they pursued the gaudy insects of the country from flower to flower. Above their heads, shining like coloured foils in the sun and varying the spotless blue of the heavens, myriads of birds (whose plumage has no rival in our colder skies,) were seen flashing to and fro. Everything was magnificent, or beautiful, or cheerful: the very reptiles gliding through the grass, partook of beauty and glowed with living gold. Sometimes a sudden and heavy rain would transiently interrupt their festivity, and fall with a mighty noise alarming to those who have never heard it before: but these fearful showers are of short continuance, they cease as suddenly as they commence; again the veil would disappear from the azure sky, again the scattered birds would sparkle in the setting light; and rainbows of inconceivable magnitude and splendor, would stretch from height to height, clasping in their gigantic arch the dark and massy forests below. Far remote from the depths of these pathless woods, would come the sound of mountain-torrents and river falls which the rain had hastily swelled. Sebastian saw not the forests of Brazil without sublime emotions: their depth, their darkness, the immeasurable height of their trees, (whose thick branches had been woven together since creation;) the strange and solemn sounds proceeding from them, (to which the mind could not affix any distinct image, but which were indeed the mixed noise of insects, of birds, and of serpents, that dwelt among their innumerous leaves) all conspired to arrest and fix attention. These vast solitudes seemed to him like the impenetrable depths of time past, and time to come: he contemplated them with similar feelings, and often did their mysterious gloom soberize his thoughts, when the delighted spirit of Kara Aziek had beguiled him into joyance. Then, lost in profound reveries, he would amaze himself with comparing the different parts of his chequered life: the years of his youth and prosperity, those of his manhood and misfortune would pass in review before him, and while he alternately remembered the days he had spent amongst the nobles in Portugal, and those he had lingered out in bitter servitude in Africa, he started to find himself thus isolated from all that was familiar, an individual almost solitary, standing on the shore of the broad Atlantic, teaching savages how to live, and peaceably gliding through existence without a name, a station, almost without a wish!