26th, 27th, 28th, passed in pleasant enough intercourse with our countrymen, though neither of us were well enough to go much on shore, therefore our friends came to us. There are eighteen English mercantile houses established at Bahia, two French, and two German. The English trade is principally carried on with Liverpool, which supplies manufactured goods and salt, in exchange for sugars, rums, tobaccos, cottons, very little coffee, and molasses. Lately, sugars have been shipped, on English account, for Hamburgh to a great extent, and I believe part of the returns are in German or Prussian woollen-cloths. The province of Bahia, by its neglect of manufactures, is quite dependent on commerce. But the distance from the sea of the province of Minas Geraes, has induced the inhabitants to weave not only enough coarse cotton cloths for home consumption, but even to become an article of trade with the other captaincies. In the province of Esperitu Santo, cotton sail-cloth is made; but the chief trade of this place is _slaving_. This year no less than seventy-six slave-ships have sailed, without reckoning the smugglers in that line. _Sunday, 28th._--Mr. Pennell had kindly fixed to-day for giving us a party in the country, and accordingly some of our young people were to go and assist in putting up tents, &c.; but a miscalculation of tide and time, and a mistake as to the practicability of landing on part of the beach beyond the light-house, occasioned a variety of adventures and accidents, without which I have always heard no fête champêtre could be perfect. However that may be, our party was a pleasant one. Instead of the tents, we made use of a country-house called the Roça, where beauty of situation, and neatness in itself and garden, made up for whatever we might have thought romantic in the tents, had they been erected. It is the fashion to pave the courts of the country-houses here with dark pebbles, and to form in the pavement a sort of mosaic with milk-white shells. The gardens are laid out in alleys, something in the oriental taste. The millions of ants, which often in the course of a single night leave the best-clothed orange-tree bare both of leaves and flowers, render it necessary to surround each tree with a little stucco wall, or rather canal, in which there is water, till they are strong enough to recover if attacked by the ants. In the garden at Roça, every shrub of value, either for fruit or beauty, was so fenced, and there were seats, and water channels, and porcelain flower-pots, that made me almost think myself in the East. But there is a newness in every thing here, a want of interest on account of what has been, that is most sensibly felt. At most, we can only go back to the naked savage who devoured his prisoner, and adorned himself with bones and feathers here. In the East, imagination is at liberty to expatiate on past grandeur, wisdom, and politeness. Monuments of art and of science meet us at every step: