passed at Belem, so far from the fazenda, to return with his young
friend to his home to see once more his father, his mother, his
sister, and to find himself, enthusiastic hunter as he was, in the
midst of these superb forests of the Upper Amazon, some of whose
secrets remained after so many centuries still unsolved by man.

Minha was twenty years old. A lovely girl, brunette, and with large
blue eyes, eyes which seemed to open into her very soul; of middle
height, good figure, and winning grace, in every way the very image
of Yaquita. A little more serious than her brother, affable,
good-natured, and charitable, she was beloved by all. On this subject
you could fearlessly interrogate the humblest servants of the
fazenda. It was unnecessary to ask her brother's friend, Manoel
Valdez, what he thought of her. He was too much interested in the
question to have replied without a certain amount of partiality.

This sketch of the Garral family would not be complete, and would
lack some of its features, were we not to mention the numerous staff
of the fazenda.

In the first place, then, it behooves us to name an old negress, of
some sixty years, called Cybele, free through the will of her master,
a slave through her affection for him and his, and who had been the
nurse of Yaquita. She was one of the family. She thee-ed and thou-ed
both daughter and mother. The whole of this good creature's life was
passed in these fields, in the middle of these forests, on that bank
of the river which bounded the horizon of the farm. Coming as a child
to Iquitos in the slave-trading times, she had never quitted the
village; she was married there, and early a widow, had lost her only
son, and remained in the service of Magalhaës. Of the Amazon she knew