The theme of the earth is expressed by the detonations of this distant drum, as one might hear a cooper in a cavernous cellar striking his casks with measured blows. The magnificence of the world is such that one anticipates at any moment having the silence shattered by the terrific explosion of a cry, the _taraba_ of a trumpet,--the delirious exultation, the intoxicated elation of copper! The news goes about that the rivers have reversed their courses; and, charging the swollen streams, all the battering force of the sea descends upon the island continent, to trade there the produce of the horizon. The work of the fields benefits by this change; chain-pumps function and confabulate; and, as far as the inundated harvest-meadows, mingled with the somber prairie, mirror the guava-colored evening, all space is filled with an hydraulic murmur. A ragged tuft of pine crosses the circle of the moon. In another place, at this most shining hour, four lovers holding a sugar-cane, stamping on the golden wheels of a press, make a stream of blue and white milk flow like the water of the sea through a very green field. And suddenly, against the blue, is thrust this young Bacchic face, inflamed with passion and with a superhuman gaiety, the eye sparkling and cynical, the lips twisted in mockery and invective! But the heavy blows of a hatchet in meat show me clearly enough where I am; and also the arms of this woman who, red to the elbows with blood dark as tobacco juice, drags out entrails from the depth of that great pearl-white carcass. A basin of iron, that some one turns over, flashes. In the rosy and golden light of Autumn, the whole bank of the canal is screened from my sight under pulleys which draw great blocks of ice, baskets of pigs, unwieldy bunches of bananas, streaming clusters of oysters, like pudding-stones,--and barrels of edible fishes so large that they are garnished and polished like porcelain. I have the energy still to notice these scales, where, with one foot placed on the platform, one fist clinging to the chain of bronze, they overturn the mighty heap of watermelons and pumpkins, and bundles of sugar-cane, tied with blossoming creepers from which spring tiny lip-colored flowers. And suddenly, lifting my chin, I find myself seated on a step of the stairway, my hand in the fur of my cat. THE BRAIN