Nindiri! How shall I describe thee, beautiful Nindiri, nestling beneath thy fragrant, evergreen roof of tropical trees, entwining their branches above thy smooth avenues, and weaving green domes over the simple dwellings of thy peaceful inhabitants! Thy musical name, given thee long ages ago, perhaps when Rome was young, has lost nothing of its melody; _Neenda_, water, and _Diria_, mountain, it still tells us, in an ancient and almost forgotten tongue, that thou slumberest now, as of yore, between the lake and the mountain! Amongst all the fairy scenes of quiet beauty which the eye of the traveller hath lingered upon, or the fancy has limned with her rosy-hued pencil, none can compare with thee, beautiful Nindiri, chosen alike of the mountain Fairies and forest Dryads, of the Sylphs of the lake, and the Naiads of the fountain! Nindiri! This little Indian village far surpassed, in point of picturesque beauty, anything we had yet seen. Oranges, plantains, marañons, jocotes, nisperos, mamays, and tall palms, with their variously-colored fruits blushing brown or golden among the leaves, and here and there a low calabash tree, with its green globes strung on every limb, all clustering together, literally embowered the cane huts of the simple-minded and industrious inhabitants. Indian women, naked to the waist, sat beneath the trees spinning snow-white cotton or the fibre of the _pita_, (_agave_,) while their noisy, naked little ones tumbled joyously about on the smoothly-beaten ground, where the sunlight fell in flickering, shifting mazes, as the wind bent the branches of the trees with its unseen fingers. Quiet primitive Nindiri! seat of the ancient caziques and their barbaric courts,—even now, amidst the din of the crowded city, and the crush and conflict of struggling thousands, amidst grasping avarice and importunate penury, bold-fronted hypocrisy and heartless fashion, where virtue is modest and vice is brazen, where fire and water, and the very lightnings of heaven, are the slaves of human will, how turns the memory to thee, as to some sweet vision of the night, some dreamy Arcadia, fancy-born, and half unreal!