“It is a little like the wood at Sitka in times of river flood,” Suzee said to me, as we sat together watching the mirrored stems and branches glide by beneath our boat.

“Yes?” I answered, smiling back upon her at the remembrance of the wood.

The stream was a wide flat here, and our boatmen suddenly directed the boat to the bank and brought it to a standstill.  “We want to go on land here and buy mangoes,” he explained in Spanish.

“Very good mangoes can be got here.”

We looked round and saw, some distance from the margin, amongst the stems of the trees standing thickly together, an adobe building, low and flat, and some figures, not much more clothed than our boatmen, squatting in front of it, counting mangoes from a great pile into baskets.

He fastened the dug-out to one of the many tree stems, drawing it close to the bank, and then he and his companion landed, leaving us alone in the lightly swaying boat.

“We’ll have lunch here, Suzee, don’t you think?” I asked her, beginning to unpack the small basket we had brought.  “Can you make tea for us there, do you think?”

“Oh yes, quite easily; they have a little kitchen here.”

In the forepart of the boat the Indians had fixed a piece of tin with a few bricks round it, forming a hearthstone and stove.  On this they cooked their own food as their surrounding pots and kettles shewed.  A few embers from their last cooking glowed still between the bricks.  Suzee leant over them, blew them into a blaze and then set our kettle on, getting out her little cups and saucers and ranging them on the floor of the boat.

I sat back and watched her.  The whole scene was a delightful one and rivalled the one I had noted at starting.  The gleaming water spread itself in large flat mirrors on every side, and the trees standing in it reflected beneath, and reaching up to the lofty roof of overarching, interlaced boughs above us, gave the effect of a hall of a thousand columns.  The adobe house of the fruit-seller seemed standing on a precarious island, so high had the floods risen round it, and numerous empty baskets and crates, evidently lifted from their moorings on the bank, drifted slowly about on the silvery tide.  Our boat itself was a lovely object with its fairy lines, its thread of smoke going up from it, and the little Oriental figure bending over the red embers in its prow.

We lunched and had our tea in this cool retreat of softened light, and knew the sun was beating with its murderous noonday glare just without.  The boatmen came back after an interval with a huge load of mangoes which they piled into the boat, and offered us sixty for five cents.  I gave them the five cents and took two or three of the fruits for myself and Suzee.  Then the moorings were undone, the men jumped in, and paddled us swiftly onwards.  The proprietor of the adobe hut came to the edge of his grove and saluted, as we passed by on a rapid current; then he and hut and mangoes all glided from us, quickly as a dream, and we were borne forward through the wonderful maze of trees over the tranquil sheets of water.