“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 instinctively gone up to his shoulder.
“We ought to respect the seriemas,” said Manoel, “for they are great destroyers of the snakes.”
“Just as we ought to respect the snakes,” replied Benito, “because they eat the noxious insects, and just as we ought the insects because they live on smaller insects more offensive still. At that rate we ought to respect everything.”