And there are rubber trees, which resemble in this region our northern ash; stately _castanhas_, the trees on which the Brazil nuts grow, and _cacaos_, that look like our cherry trees, only they give us our chocolate and cocoa beans instead and have blossoms of a saffron tint; mahoganies, rosewoods and satinwoods and great sheaves of whispering bamboo; myriads of ferns and exquisitely tinted orchids, acacias, scarlet passion flowers, begonias, yellow and blue—flowers innumerable in the wildest profusion. Not little ones like our violets hiding modestly among the mosses and grass, but big blossoms growing luxuriantly on bushes and on the parasite vines that twine about the trunks of the trees and hang in festoons from their branches, until the whole river border seems ablaze with their vivid lights; and there are still the monkeys and beautiful butterflies and humming birds, and the parrots, macaws, herons, egrets, toucans, and countless other gorgeously feathered birds, and the Indian villages, too, in the midst of their orange and banana groves or huddled near the beaches where the turtles breed. Only now all these may be seen from the decks of ocean liners, or, if one starts from Belém or Iquitos, from river steamers as safe and comfortably equipped and setting as good a table as most of those in our northern waters. Now the alligators and snakes and tigers have been driven far from the beaten tracks—not too far, though, for the sportsman who loves the excitement of hunting big game—now the negro slaves have been freed and the Indians are no longer hostile; now, in many places, lands have been drained and clearings made in the forests, and waste marshes and giant trees have made way for pastures and thrifty-looking plantations, where grain, coffee, sugar, tobacco and cotton, and pineapples and many other things are cultivated; now the rubber and cacao and nut gatherers penetrate far into the woods; now small, isolated communities have grown to be large ones, that send their produce directly from their own docks to the markets of the world.