On the same evening, after a journey of two leagues and a half we reached Villa de Crato; the road all the way was level and sandy, the country on the south side was well wooded with large trees, while the north, which is much flatter, was principally planted with sugar-cane, and several houses were seen at very short intervals, each with a mill and a boiling-house attached to it, for the purpose of converting the juice of the cane into Rapadura. The Carnahuba is here replaced by another kind of palm called Macahuba (_Acrocomia sclerocarpa_, Mart.), which rises to about the same height, but has pinnated leaves, and a stem which, instead of being the same thickness throughout, swells out considerably above the middle, and is exactly the same species as one very common about Pernambuco; along with this grows another species much resembling the cocoa-nut in its height and foliage, but with a much thicker stem; the nuts which are about the size of apples, are produced in large clusters; it is a species of _Attalea_, and is here called Palmeira. It is impossible to express the delight I experienced on entering this comparatively rich and smiling district, after a ride of more than three hundred miles through a country which at that season was little better than a desert; the evening was one of the most beautiful I ever remember to have seen, the sun was setting in great splendour behind the Serra de Araripe, a long range of hills about a league to the westward of the Villa, but the freshness of this region seemed to deprive its rays of that burning heat which shortly before sunset is so oppressive to the traveller in the lower country. The beauty of the night, the cool and reviving feeling of the atmosphere, and the richness of the landscape, so different from what I had lately seen, all tended to produce a buoyancy of spirit such as only the lover of nature can experience, and which I vainly wished might prove enduring, as I felt not only at ease with myself, but “at peace with all below.”