"You are at home, Minha, or at least you say so," said Benito, "and
that is the way you talk of your riches!"

"Sneer away, little brother!" replied Minha; "such beautiful things
are only lent to us; is it not so, Manoel? They come from the hand of
the Almighty and belong to the world!"

"Let Benito laugh on, Minha," said Manoel. "He hides it very well,
but he is a poet himself when his time comes, and he admires as much
as we do all these beauties of nature. Only when his gun is on his
arm, good-by to poetry!"

"Then be a poet now," replied the girl.

"I am a poet," said Benito. "O! Nature-enchanting, etc."

We may confess, however, that in forbidding him to use his gun Minha
had imposed on him a genuine privation. There was no lack of game in
the woods, and several magnificent opportunities he had declined with
regret.

In some of the less wooded parts, in places where the breaks were
tolerably spacious, they saw several pairs of ostriches, of the
species known as _"naudus,"_ from four to five feet high, accompanied
by their inseparable _"seriemas,"_ a sort of turkey, infinitely
better from an edible point of view than the huge birds they escort.

"See what that wretched promise costs me," sighed Benito, as, at a
gesture from his sister, he replaced under his arm the gun which had