Not very long ago the writer accompanied a gold-mining expedition into the tropical forests of Guiana, and stumbled across an English traveler who was collecting birds for a London and Parisian firm of merchants. He was settled in a village of Acawois Indians, far from any of the haunts of the white man. Every male Indian of the village was in his service, and at the conclusion of each week they received pay, according to results, in cheap knives, powder, hatchets, cooking utensils, et cetera; pay day being usually celebrated by a feast, in which all the men got fearfully intoxicated on a filthy compound called paiwarri.
We started out every morning immediately after breakfast. The Indians were armed with bows and arrows and blowpipes. The collector divided them into sections, and sent them off into the bush, himself accompanying one group, but without doing any shooting. I fastened on to a man and a boy, and kept close in their wake all day. With the skill of a denizen of the woods, my man did not walk a step without rousing a feathered creature of some sort. Sometimes a large bird—a toucan or a macaw—would flap clumsily out of a bush, and the twang of the bowstring would announce its death. Small birds fluttered across our path constantly, and these were promptly brought down with the pipe. Now and then a flight of a score or two would suddenly settle all over in the branches about our heads, and on these occasions the Indian managed to kill a dozen or so before they appeared to realize their danger. It was kill, kill, kill, without a moment’s pause. As the birds fell, the boy secured the bodies and dropped them into a long wicker basket, which was strapped across his forehead and hung down his back.
On our return to the village the men were coming in and emptying their baskets onto a long table in the middle of the Englishman’s hut. Many of the birds were of the most brilliant plumage; but there were hundreds of birds, not boasting any brightness of color, that were of no use. The slaughter, in fact, is much greater in regard to the birds that are not wanted than those which reach the English market. The collector, stripped to the shirt, and with his sleeves rolled up, set to work at once, going through the game. He handled every bird, dropping those pretty enough for a bonnet or valuable enough for a collection into one heap, and the useless ones into another. Not more than one bird in ten was retained; the rest had been slaughtered uselessly. When I reproached my friend with this wanton waste of feathered life, he replied that he could not attempt to kill the birds himself, and it was impossible to get Indians to discriminate between valuable and worthless specimens.
JOKES FROM JERROLD.
Douglas Jerrold, once the keenest of wits, a remarkable combination of Thackeray and Hood, is now almost forgotten. It is a pity. His jests were singularly ripe and racy. He had no mercy on the sentimentalists.
“I love nature,” said one of these dawdles to him one day. “I often take a book, retire into some unfrequented field, lie down, gaze on the heavens, then study. If there are any animals in the field, so much the better. The cow approaches, and looks down upon me; and I—I look up to her.”
“Exactly,” said Jerrold, “you look up to her with a filial smile!”
A delightful way of telling him he was a calf.
Another sentimentalist got a beautiful settler in this way: Walking in the country, Jerrold and a small party of friends stopped to notice the antics of a small donkey in a field. A gushing poet in the party said:
“Dear little thing; how I should like to buy it and give it to my mother!”