While we prepare to take astronomical observations, half a dozen large fires are lighted round about, in whose fitful blaze the neighboring forest-trees appear like huge phantoms, looking contemptuously down on us, poor tiny mortals. Our Indians warm themselves in the cheerful glow, smoking, and chatting of the day's adventures, or rather of what are regarded as such,--unusual good or ill luck at fishing and hunting; the casual meeting of some canoe; or the sight of a seringueiro's poor cottage. Work over, they take off the rough cascara, and put on the camiseta, a cotton garment without sleeves, resembling a wide poncho sewn together at the sides, and whose dazzling whiteness is set off by two scarlet stripes along the seams. The ample folds and the simple cut of the garment, which is made by the Indian women of the Missions on very primitive looms, give quite a stately, classical appearance to the numerous groups round the fires. Such must have been the aspect presented by the halting-places of those daring seafarers, the Phoenicians, who were the first to call into life an international commerce, and whose light-rigged barques first ventured to distant shores, to bring home the precious amber and the useful tin. Only the dense swarms of mosquitoes, which set in immediately after sunset, remind us rather unpleasantly that we are far off from those happy northern regions, where such a nuisance can hardly be well imagined. Especially in the dense forest beneath cacao-bushes, or under the close leafage of the large figueiras, where no breath of air incommodes those light-winged tormentors, it is quite impossible, for the European at least, to close an eye without the shelter of a mosquiteiro (mosquito-net); and we could but wonder at our Indians, most of whom did without it. After supper they simply spread a hide on the ground, on which, with no covering other than the starry firmament above them, they slept undisturbed till the dawn, only occasionally brushing away, as if by way of diversion, the most obtrusive of the little fiends. The capitanos only, and one or other of the older rowers, allow themselves the luxury of good cotton hammocks, which are also made by their wives in the Missions. Such, with few variations, was the course of our daily life, until we reached the regions of the rapids, when, of course, the hundred little incidents connected with the dragging of the canoes through narrow, foaming channels, and with carrying the goods and the vessels themselves overland, disturbed the monotony of this rude forest life. BESIEGED BY PECCARIES. JAMES W. WELLS.