Blanche listened, wondered, and remembered, but the more she heard, the less she envied the lot of Gaspar’s heroes; her soul alive to pleasure rather than to ambition, loved to diffuse itself over the beauties of creation: she frequently forgot her lecturer in the sternest part of his histories, while she watched the majestic motion of some tall magnolia as the land-breeze slowly lifted its far-spreading branches, and showered its white blossoms on every side like vegetable snows. Her ear was entranced with music, her eye with colours; the song of birds, and the varieties of verdure, were at all times more magical to her than barren descriptions of gaudy courts, or frightful portraits of warring armies. She loved Gaspar, but it was rather for the manner in which he told his narratives, than for the narratives themselves: affection beaming in all his looks, went at once to her infant heart, and often did she break upon his details and banish from his mind everything but herself, by suddenly clasping him round the neck, uttering some endearing epithet, and printing on his cheek the pure, the angel kiss of childish love. Carried in his arms to the summit of such mountains as human industry had succeeded in making accessible to human feet, she would gaze with him on the distant sea, and hear with delight that she was one day to cross it and to behold the happy country he described: then she would eagerly draw a plan of their removal from Cachoeira, in which every inhabitant was included. The children must go because they were her playfellows, their parents could not be left behind, else her young associates would be sad, and the very aged people ought to accompany them also, since otherwise they must perish for want of care and food: Barémel, dear Barémel, taught her to feel that every other young heart would have some dumb favorite to carry away, till at last she would multiply her companions in this removal, so that Gaspar was obliged to confess she must have an ark larger than Noah’s to transport the whole colony. Blanche would then abandon the idea totally, (for curiosity was a feeble sentiment in her breast when compared with tenderness) she loved the good Indians, and no novelty in Europe compensated to her for the pain of quitting them for ever. Content with her situation, occupied and amused by turns, passionately fond of her parents, she found no blank in the days that flowed on at Cachoeira: innocence, gaiety, and affection, made them all charming. Blanche had attained her seventh year, when some change was produced in the prospects of her family.