“That will be nice!”
“I leave everything to your good taste.”
“And that will do us honor, father. It ought to, for the sake of the splendid country we are going through—which is yours, by the way, and into which you are to enter after so many years’ absence.”
“Yes, Minha; yes,” replied Joam. “It is rather as if we were returning from exile—voluntary exile! Do your best; I approve beforehand of what you do.”
On Minha and Lina, to whom were added of their own free will Manoel on the one side and Fragoso on the other, devolved the care of decorating the inside of the house. With some imagination and a little artistic feeling the result was highly satisfactory.
The best furniture of the fazenda naturally found its place within, as after arriving in Para they could easily return it by one of the igariteos. Tables, bamboo easy-chairs, cane sofas, carved wood shelves, everything that constituted the charming furniture of the tropics, was disposed with taste about the floating home. No one is likely to imagine that the walls remained bare. The boards were hidden beneath hangings of most agreeable variety. These hangings were made of valuable bark, that of the “tuturis,” which is raised up in large folds like the brocades and damasks and softest and richest materials of our modern looms. On the floors of the rooms were jaguar skins, with wonderful spots, and thick monkey furs of exquisite fleeciness. Light curtains of the russet silk, produced by the “sumauma,” hung from the windows. The beds, enveloped in mosquito curtains, had their pillows, mattresses, and bolsters filled with that fresh and elastic substance which in the Upper Amazon is yielded by the bombax.
Throughout on the shelves and side-tables were little odds and ends, brought from Rio Janeiro or Belem, those most precious to Minha being such as had come from Manoel. What could be more pleasing in her eyes than the knickknacks given by a loving hand which spoke to her without saying anything?
In a few days the interior was completed, and it looked just like the interior of the fazenda. A stationary house under a lovely clump of trees on the borders of some beautiful river! Until it descended between the banks of the larger stream it would not be out of keeping with the picturesque landscape which stretched away on each side of it.
We may add that the exterior of the house was no less charming than the interior.
In fact, on the outside the young fellows had given free scope to their taste and imagination.