We left La Pieta early the next morning, in the bright sunlight, but instead of climbing laboriously into the sombre mountains of the day before, we trotted briskly along a level path between sunny fields and delicate plants, and trees with a pale-green foliage, and covered with the most beautiful white-and-purple flowers. There were hundreds of doves in the air, and in the bushes many birds of brilliant blue-and-black or orange-and-scarlet plumage, and one of more sober colors with two long white tail-feathers and a white crest, like a macaw that had turned Quaker. None of these showed the least inclination to disturb himself as we approached. An hour after our setting forth we plunged into a forest of manacca-palms, through which we rode the rest of the morning. This was the most beautiful and wonderful experience of our journey. The manacca-palm differs from the cocoanut or royal palm in that its branches seem to rise directly from the earth, and not to sprout, as do the others, from the top of a tall trunk. Each branch has a single stem, and the leaf spreads and falls from either side of this, cut into even blades, like a giant fern. [Illustration: NATIVE METHOD OF DRYING COFFEE] There is a plant that looks like the manacca-palm at home which you see in flower-pots in the corners of drawing-rooms at weddings, and consequently when we saw the real manacca-palm the effect was curious. It did not seem as though they were monster specimens of these little plants in the States, but as though we had grown smaller. We felt dwarfed, as though we had come across a rose-bush as large as a tree. The branches of these palms were sixty feet high, and occasionally six feet broad, and bent and swayed and interlaced in the most graceful and exquisite confusion. Every blade trembled in the air, and for hours we heard no other sound save their perpetual murmur and rustle. Not even the hoofs of our mules gave a sound, for they trod on the dead leaves of centuries. The palms made a natural archway for us, and the leaves hung like a portière across the path, and you would see the man riding in front raise his arm and push the long blades to either side, and disappear as they fell again into place behind him. It was like a scene on the tropical island of a pantomime, where everything is exaggerated both in size and in beauty. It made you think of a giant aquarium or conservatory which had been long neglected.