At Piedade, mules from Mr. March’s Fazenda were waiting for us and our luggage, and, after a short stay for the arrangement of the latter, we began the land part of our journey. At Piedade, which only consists of a few scattered houses, a large hotel was being erected by Col. Leite, a Brazilian gentleman, who, at his own expense, was then making a new road across the Organ Mountains, to join the one which leads to the mining districts from Porto de Estrella, another landing place at the head of the bay. The latter place has hitherto been the common harbour between Rio and the interior. The Colonel, however, expects that his new road will ultimately be preferred, as it is much shorter. Four years after when I again visited this part of the country, I found that this road was still in an unfinished state. To save the expense of an engineer he had traced the road himself, and the consequence was, that it afterwards required many alterations. The road from Piedade to Magé, a small town about four miles distant, leads through a flat, sandy, and, in several places, marshy plain, abounding with low trees and beautiful flowering shrubs. The hedges were covered with numerous climbers, one of them a small sweet-flowered kind of Jasmine, the only one which has hitherto been found in a wild state on the continent of America. In moist places, _Dichorizandra thyrsiflora_, with its spikes of azure blossoms, was not uncommon, while the sandy fields were covered with a large kind of _Cactus_, among which many plants of the aloe-like _Fourcroya gigantea_ were to be seen throwing up their flowering stems to a height of thirty and forty feet.