seen promenading up and down the sheet-iron walls.

On the main floor the building had two large rooms across the centre,
one on the front and one on the rear. At each side were four small
rooms. The large front-room was used as a dining-room and had two
broad tables of planed palm trunks. The side-rooms were bedrooms,
generally speaking, though most of the time I was there some were
used for stabling the pigs and goats, which had to be taken in owing
to the rainy season.

It is a simple matter to keep a hotel on the upper Amazon. Each room
in the _Hotel de Augusto_ was neatly and chastely furnished with
a pair of iron hooks from which to hang the hammock, an article
one had to provide himself. There was nothing in the room besides
the hooks. No complete privacy was possible because the corrugated
sheet-iron partitions forming the walls did not extend to the roof. The
floors were sections of palm trees, with the flat side down, making
a succession of ridges with open spaces of about an inch between,
through which the ground or the water, according to the season, was
visible. The meals were of the usual monotonous fare typical of the
region. Food is imported at an enormous cost to this remote place,
since there is absolutely no local agriculture. Even sugar and rice,
for instance, which are among the important products of Brazil,
can be had in New York for about one-tenth of what the natives pay
for them in Remate de Males. A can of condensed milk, made to sell
in America for eight or nine cents, brings sixty cents on the upper
Amazon, and preserved butter costs $1.20 a pound.

The following prices which I have had to pay during the wet season
in this town will, doubtless, be of interest: