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JUNGLE PEACE

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JUNGLE PEACE

BY

WILLIAM BEEBE

Foreword by
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

THE MODERN LIBRARY

PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK

Copyright, 1920, by
HENRY HOLT & CO.

Manufactured in the United States of America
Bound for THE MODERN LIBRARY by H. Wolff

TO
COLONEL and MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I OFFER THIS VOLUME WITH DEEPEST FRIENDSHIP

NOTE

With three exceptions these chapters have appeared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, and I publish them through the kindness of the Editor, Ellery Sedgwick. "Hoatzins at Home" is adapted from a title in my Tropical Wild Life, Volume I, published by the New York Zoölogical Society, which deals with the more technical results of study at the Research Station. The illustrations are from my own photographs, except the frontispiece and those facing pages 162, 186, and 268, which were taken by Paul G. Howes. All the chapters dealing with the jungle relate to Bartica District, British Guiana, except X, which refers to Pará at the mouth of the Amazon.

FOREWORD

Mr. Beebe's volume is one of the rare books which represent a positive addition to the sum total of genuine literature. It is not merely a "book of the season" or "book of the year"; it will stand on the shelves of cultivated people, of people whose taste in reading is both wide and good, as long as men and women appreciate charm of form in the writings of men who also combine love of daring adventure with the power to observe and vividly to record the things of strange interest which they have seen.

Nothing like this type of book was written until within the last century and a half. Books of this kind can only be produced in a refined, cultivated, civilized society. In rude societies there may be much appreciation of outdoor life, much fierce joy in hunting, much longing for adventurous wandering, but the appreciation and joy are inarticulate; for in such societies the people who write are generally not the people who act, and they express emotions by words as conventional as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the popular poetry which has come down to us from early times, in the ballads of Britain and France, and the folk songs of the Russian and Turkish steppes, there are occasional lines which bring before us the song birds in Spring, in the merry greenwood, or the great flocks of water fowl on the ponds of the plains of green grass; but they are merely a few words of incidental description of the land through which the hero rides to foray and battle. We do not pass much beyond this stage even with Chaucer and the Minnesingers; and although the heroes of the Nibelungenlied were mighty hunters, those who described their deeds knew nothing of the game, even of their own forests. There were sovereigns of Nineveh whose devotion to the bolder forms of the chase was a passion; and Kings and Queens of Memphis and Thebes who with absorbed and intelligent curiosity sought for information about the life of far-off lands; but their laborious writings, if they did not deal with business contracts, were generally concerned only with boastful annals or religious ritual.

Hitherto there have been only two periods of Western history in which both the art of expression, and the breadth of interest among cultivated men, grew to a point which permitted the cultivated man to turn back to the life of the open which his inarticulate ancestor had gradually abandoned, and to enjoy, appreciate, and describe it.

One of these periods included the society which enjoyed Theocritus and the society which applauded the country poems of Virgil. The other includes our own time, and may roughly be said to have begun when the rise of writers like Pope showed that English eighteenth century society had at last regained the level of the ancient society which enjoyed Cicero and Horace and Pliny; in France the advance had been more rapid.

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that there appeared (in primitive form, of course, as with all early types) "nature books" and books of natural history, big game hunting and adventures in out-of-the-way lands. In the Middle Ages there had been many "beastiaries," in which the natural history was for the most part fabulous; and many French and German, and some Italian, Spanish, and English hunting books, which were for the most part as stiff and technical as treatises on farriery.

But Bruce and Le Vaillant at last foreshadowed the wilderness—wanderers, half explorers, half big game hunters, of our own day; with Gilbert White, there appeared the first book of literary work by a stay-at-home lover of nature and natural history; and a century ago Waterton's "Wanderings" marked the beginning of the literature wherein field naturalists who are also men of letters and men of action have described for us the magic and interest, the terror and beauty of the far-off wilds where nature gives peace to bold souls and inspires terror in the mind.

Gilbert White and Waterton added in new ways to the sum of achievement of men of letters. Each made a contribution to literature as new and distinctive as the Idylls of Theocritus—it is not necessary to compare the worth of two kinds of literary work, and in speaking of Theocritus I am making no such comparison, but merely indicating that literature may be literature even although of a totally new type. The new literature, of appreciative love of nature and of hardy outdoor life, will appeal only to the never very extensive class which neither ignorantly believes that literature is purely an affair of the lamp and the library, nor ignorantly proclaims its own shortcomings and conceit by boasting that it does not value books because, forsooth, it is too "red-blooded" to care for anything except action. A really first-class hunting book, for instance, ought to be written by a man of prowess and adventure, who is a fair out-of-doors naturalist; who loves nature, who loves books, and who possesses the gift of seeing what is worth seeing and of portraying it with vivid force and yet with refinement. Such men are rare; and it is not always easy for them to command an audience.

In his own much larger field Mr. Beebe is just such a man; and he has such marked ability that he can make and command his audience. Exactly as John Burroughs is the man who has carried to its highest point of development the school in which Gilbert White was the first scholar, so Beebe is the man who has turned into a new type of higher literature the kind of work first produced by Waterton.

Nothing of this kind could have been done by the man who was only a good writer, only a trained scientific observer, or only an enterprising and adventurous traveler. Mr. Beebe is not merely one of these, but all three; and he is very much more in addition. He possesses a wide field of interest; he is in the truest sense of the word a man of broad and deep cultivation. He cares greatly for noble architecture and noble poetry; for beautiful pictures and statues and finely written books. Nor are his interests only concerned with nature apart from man and from the works of man. He possesses an extraordinary sympathy with and understanding of mankind itself, in all its myriad types and varieties. In this book, and in his other recent writing (for I wish to draw a sharp line in favor of what he has recently written as compared with his earlier and more commonplace work), some of his most interesting descriptions are of the wild folk he meets in the wilderness—black or yellow, brown or red—and of some nominally tamer folk with whom he has foregathered in civilization.

I don't know in which category, civilization or savagery, the trenches at the front ought to come; but Mr. Beebe, a man of deeds as well as of books, knows the trenches and the people in them, and the pathetic or pitiful or else wholly brave and admirable people back of them; and his sketches of some of them and of their deeds and of the by-products of war as waged today are wholly admirable. Lowell, praising the Elizabethans as both doers and writers, spoke of Ben Jonson's having trailed a pike in the lowlands, and of Kenelm Digby's having illustrated a point in physics by the effects of the concussion of the guns in the sea fight in which he took part off Scanderoon. Beebe, as bomber, has sailed in planes over the German lines; in company with a French officer he has listened to a wolf howl just back of the fighting front; he has gone with Iroquois Indians into the No Man's Land between the trenches of the mightiest armies the world has ever seen.

This volume was written when the writer's soul was sick of the carnage which has turned the soil of Northern France into a red desert of horror. To him the jungle seemed peaceful, and the underlying war among its furtive dwellers but a small thing compared to the awful contest raging among the most highly civilized of the nations of mankind. It is the same feeling that makes strong men, who have sickened of the mean and squalid injustice of so much of life in the centres of material progress, turn with longing to the waste places where no paths penetrate the frowning or smiling forests and no keels furrow the lonely rivers.

The jungle he herein describes is that of Guiana; and in the introductory chapters he gives cameos of what one sees sailing southward through the lovely islands where the fronds of the palms thrash endlessly as the warm trade blows. He knows well and intimately Malaysia and the East Indian islands, and Ceylon and Farther India and mid-China and the stupendous mountain masses of the Himalayas. All of these he will some time put before us, in volumes not one of which can be spared from the library of any man who loves life and literature. This is the first of these volumes. In it are records of extraordinary scientific interest, in language which has all the charm of an essay of Robert Louis Stevenson. He tells of bird and beast and plant and insect; of the hoatzin, a bird out of place in the modern world, a bird which comes down unchanged from a time when birds merely fluttered instead of flying—and had only recently learned to flutter instead of gliding. Whatever he touches he turns into the gold of truth rightly interpreted and vividly set forth—as witness his extraordinary account of the sleeping parlor of certain gorgeous tropic butterflies.

If I had space I would like to give an abstract of the whole book. As it is I merely advise all who love good books, very good books, at once to get this book of Mr. Beebe.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Reprinted from the New York Times. Review of Books.

CONTENTS

I

JUNGLE PEACE

After creeping through slime-filled holes beneath the shrieking of swift metal, after splashing one's plane through companionable clouds three miles above the little jagged, hero-filled ditches, and dodging other sudden-born clouds of nauseous fumes and blasting heart of steel; after these, one craves thoughts of comfortable hens, sweet apple orchards, or ineffable themes of opera. And when nerves have cried for a time 'enough' and an unsteady hand threatens to turn a joy stick into a sign post to Charon, the mind seeks amelioration—some symbol of worthy content and peace—and for my part, I turn with all desire to the jungles of the tropics.

If one looks the jungle straight in the face and transcribes what is seen, there is evolved technical science, and until this can be done with accuracy and discretion, one can never feel worthy now and then, of stealing quietly up a side aisle of the great green wonderland, and, as I have done in these pages, looking obliquely at all things, observing them as actors and companions rather than as species and varieties; softening facts with quiet meditation, leavening science with thoughts of the sheer joy of existence. It should be possible occasionally to achieve this and yet to return to science enriched and with enthusiasm, and again to play some little part in the great physical struggle—that wonderful strife which must give to future peace and contentment new appreciation, a worthier enjoyment.

It is possible to enter a jungle and become acutely aware of poison fang and rending claw—much as a pacifist considers the high adventure of righteous war. But it is infinitely more wonderful and altogether satisfying to slip quietly and receptively into the life of the jungle, to accept all things as worthy and reasonable; to sense the beauty, the joy, the majestic serenity of this age-old fraternity of nature, into whose sanctuary man's entrance is unnoticed, his absence unregretted. The peace of the jungle is beyond all telling.

II

SEA-WRACK

Suspended in the naked air eight thousand feet above New York, I look down and see the city and its inhabitants merged into one. From this height the metropolis is less interesting and hardly more noticeable than many tropical ants' nests which have come under my observation. Circling slowly earthward, I have watched the city split apart into its canyon streets, and have finally distinguished the caterpillars which I knew were trains, and the black beetles which must be automobiles. Last, and apparently least, were resolved a multitude of tiny specks, weird beings all hats and legs, which were undoubtedly the makers and owners of these beetles and worms and canyons.

In many similar bird's-eye-views of the city one phase of activity always amuses and thrills. Circling as low as I dare, bumped and jolted by the surging uprush of invisible spouts of warm air, I head, like a frigate-bird, straight into the teeth of the wind and hang for a time parallel with the streaming lines of gray and white smoke. Near the margin of the city where the glittering water reaches long fingers in between the wharves, a crowd of people push, antwise, down to the brink. Many burdened individuals pass and repass over slender bridges or gang-planks, for all the world like leaf-cutting ants transporting their booty over twigs and grass stems. Then comes a frantic waving of antennæ, (or are they handkerchiefs), and finally part of the wharf detaches itself and is slowly separated from the city. Now I can mount higher to a less dangerous altitude and watch the ship become a drifting leaf, then a floating mote, to vanish at last over a curve of the world. I cease chuckling into the roar of my motor; my amusement becomes all thrill. The gods shift and change: Yoharneth-Lahai leaves me, and in his place comes Slid, with the hand of Roon beside me on the wheel. I hasten hangarwards with the gulls which are beating towards their roosting sands of far Long Island beaches.

On some future day I in my turn, scurry up a gang-plank laden with my own particular bundles, following days of haste and nights of planning. I go out on the upper deck of the vessel, look upward at a gull and think of the amusing side of all the fuss and preparation, the farewells, the departure, which sufficient perspective gives. And then I look ahead, out toward the blue-black ocean, and up again to the passing gulls, and the old, yet ever new thrill of travel, of exploration, possesses me. Even if now the thrill is shared by none other, if I must stand alone at the rail watching the bow dip to the first swell outside the harbor, I am yet glad to be one of the ants which has escaped from the turmoil of the great nest, to drift for a while on this tossing leaf.

At the earnest of winter—whether biting frost or flurry of snowflakes—a woodchuck mounts his little moraine of trampled earth, looks about upon the saddening world, disapproves, and descends to his long winter's sleep. An exact parallel may be observed in the average passenger. As the close perspective of home, of streets, of terrestrial society slips away, and his timid eyes gaze upon the unwonted sight of a horizon—a level horizon unobstructed by any obstacles of man's devising, mental and physical activity desert him: he hibernates. He swathes himself, larva-like—in many wrappings, and encases himself in the angular cocoons furnished for the purpose at one dollar each by the deck steward; or he haunts the smoking room, and under the stimulus of unaccustomed beverages enters into arguments at levels of intelligence and logic which would hardly tax the powers of Pithecanthropus or a Bushman.

From the moment of sailing I am always impressed with the amusing terrestrial instincts of most human beings. They leave their fellows and the very wharf itself with regret, and no sooner are they surrounded by old ocean than their desires fly ahead to the day of freedom from this transitory aquatic prison. En route, every thought, every worry, every hope is centripetal. The littlenesses of ship life are magnified to subjects of vital importance, and so perennial and enthusiastic are these discussions that it seems as if the neighbor's accent, the daily dessert, the sempiternal post-mortem of the bridge game, the home life of the stewardess, must contain elements of greatness and goodness. With a few phonograph records it would not be a difficult matter to dictate in advance a satisfactory part in the average conversation at the Captain's table. The subjects, almost without exception, are capable of prediction, the remarks and points of view may be anticipated.

Occasionally a passenger detaches his mind from the ship and its doings long enough to take note of something happening beyond the rail—some cosmic phenomenon which he indicates with unerring finger as a beautiful sunset, frequently reassuring himself of our recognition by a careful enumeration of his conception of the colors. Or a school of dolphins undulates through two mediums, and is announced, in a commendably Adam-like, but quite inaccurate spirit, as porpoises or young whales. Mercury, setting laggardly in the west, is gilded anew by our informant as a lightship, or some phare off Cape Imagination. We shall draw a veil or go below, when an "average citizen" begins to expound the stars and constellations.

All this is only amusing, and with the limited interest in the ship and the trip which the usual passenger permits himself, he still derives an amazing amount of pleasure from it all. It is a wonderful child-like joy, whether of convincingly misnaming stars, enthusiastically playing an atrocious game of shuffle-board, or estimating the ship's log with methods of cunning mathematical accuracy, but hopeless financial results. All these things I have done and shall doubtless continue to do on future voyages, but there is an additional joy of striving to break with precedent, to concentrate on the alluring possibilities of new experiences, new discoveries, on board ship.

If the vessel is an oasis in a desert, or in a "waste of waters" as is usually announced at table about the second or third day out, then I am a true Arab, or, to follow more closely the dinner simile, a Jonah of sorts, for my interest is so much more with the said waste, or the things in it and above it, than with my swathed, hibernating fellow mortals.

Precedent on board ship is not easily to be broken, and much depends on the personality of the Captain. If he has dipped into little-known places all over the world with which you are familiar, or if you show appreciation of a Captain's point of view, the battle is won. A few remarks about the difficulty of navigation of Nippon's Inland Sea, a rebuke of some thoughtless idiot at table who hopes for a storm; such things soon draw forth casual inquiries on his side, and when a Captain begins to ask questions, the freedom of the chart-room is yours, and your unheard-of requests which only a naturalist could invent or desire, will not fail of fulfilment.

I am off on a voyage of two weeks to British Guiana and I begin to ponder the solution of my first problem. The vessel plows along at a ten-knot rate, through waters teeming with interesting life and stopping at islands where every moment ashore is of thrilling scientific possibility. By what means can I achieve the impossible and study the life of this great ocean as we slip rapidly through it—an ocean so all-encompassing, yet to a passenger, so inaccessible.

Day after day I scan the surface for momentary glimpses of cetaceans, and the air for passing sea birds. Even the rigging, at certain seasons, is worth watching as a resting place for migrating birds. The extreme bow is one of the best points of vantage, but the spot of all spots for an observer is the appropriately named crow's nest, high up on the foremast. You have indeed won the Captain over to your bizarre activities when he accords permission to climb the swaying ratlines and heave yourself into that wonderful place. It is tame enough when compared with piloting a plane among the clouds, but it presents an enormous expanse of ocean compared with the humble deck view. Here you can follow the small whales or blackfish down and down long after they have sounded; with your binoculars you can see every detail of the great floating turtles. And when the sun sinks in glory which is terrible in its grandeur, you may let it fill your senses with wordless ecstasy, without fear of interpretive interruption. Save for the other matchstick mast and the spider-web ratlines, the horizon is unbroken.

Many years ago I spent a night in the torch of the Statue of Liberty and each time I dozed, the twenty odd inch arch through which the lofty structure swayed, awoke me again and again, being changed, behind one's closed lids, into a single motion, apparently that of a gradually accelerated fall to earth. In the crow's nest, when the ship is rolling, I can often conjure up the same feeling when my eyes are shut, but now I react to a new stimulus and instinctively reach for a steering rod, as the sensation is that of a wing slip, consequent upon too slow progress of an aeroplane.

Among the luggage which I take on board is invariably a large, eight-pronged, iron grapple, with a long coil of rope. These the stewards eye askance when they place them in my cabin, and hold whispered consultations as to their possible use. It is by no accident or chance that before the third day I have won the attention and a certain amount of interest of the Captain and have obtained permission to put his vessel to a novel use. About the fourth day, from the upper deck or the ship's bow, I begin to see floating patches of seaweed—gulfweed or sargasso as it is called. For the most part this appears as single stems or in small rounded heads, awash with the surface. But as we proceed southward larger masses appear, and then, with my assistant, I get my crude apparatus ready. We fasten one end of the coil of rope to the rail of the lowest open deck forward, and then I mount the rail, securing a good grip with legs and feet. As a cowboy on a fractious horse gathers the loops of his lariat for the throw, so I estimate my distance and balance myself for the propitious moment. Now if not before, the audience gathers. It is flattering to see how quickly my performance will empty the smoking room, put an end to bridge games and fill the deck chairs with deserted, outspread yellow-backs. As dangerous rival attractions, I admit only boat-drill and the dinner gong!

My whole object is of course to secure as much as possible of the sargasso weed together with its strange inhabitants, and to this end I have tramped the decks of steamers with the patience of the pedestrian of Chillon. I have learned the exact portions of the vessels where the strain is the least, and where the water, outflung from the bow is redrawn most closely to the vessel's side. I have had overheavy grapples dragged from my hand and barely escaped following the lost instrument. I have seen too-light irons skip along the surface, touching only the high spots of the waves. As one drops one's aerial bomb well in advance of the object aimed at, so I have had to learn to adjust the advance of my cast to the speed of the ship.

I make throw after throw in vain, and my audience is beginning to jeer and to threaten to return to the unfinished no trumps, or the final chapter of "The Lure of Love." Near the water level as I am, I can yet see ahead a big 'slick' of golden brown, and I wait. But the bow dips farther and farther away and I almost give up hope. Then I look up appealingly to the bridge and catch a twinkle in the Captain's eye. Even as I look he motions to the wheelman and the second succeeding dip of the bow slews it nearer the aquatic golden field. Still more it swings to starboard and at last crashes down into the very heart of the dense mass of weed. The frothing water alongside is thick with the tangle of floating vegetation, and it is impossible to miss. I throw and lean far over, dragging the grapple until its arms are packed full. Then with all my strength I draw up, hand over hand, leaning far out so it will not bang against the side, and dump the dripping mass on the deck. My helper instantly frees the prongs and I make a second cast and get another rich haul before the last of the field of weed drifts astern and tarnishes the emerald foam of the propeller churned wake.

For a few minutes there is wild excitement. My audience dances and shouts with enthusiasm from the upper rails, members of the crew appear and help me pursue agile crabs and flopping fish about the deck. Even the surly old mate roars down news of another batch of weed ahead, and I curb my curiosity and again mount my precarious roost.

In the course of several days I acquire a wonderful sunburn, considerable accuracy in flinging my octodont, and finally a series of tumblers of very interesting specimens, which furnish me with many new facts, and my fellow passengers with the means to kill much of that embarrassing concomitant of ocean voyages—time.

An amazing amount of fiction and nonsense has been written about the sargasso weed, but the truth is actually more unbelievable. Though we see it in such immense patches, and although for days the ocean may be flecked with the scattered heads of the weed, yet it is no more at home in mid-ocean than the falling leaves in autumn may claim as their place of abode, the breeze which whirls them about, or the moss upon which at last they come to rest. Along the coast of Central America the sargasso weed grows, clinging, as is the way with seaweeds, to coral and rock and shell, and flowering and fruiting after its lowly fashion. The berry-like bladders with which the stems are strung, are filled with gas and enable the plants to maintain their position regardless of the state of the tide. Vast quantities are torn away by the waves and drift out to sea and these stray masses are what we see on every trip south, and which, caught in the great mid-ocean eddy, form the so-called Sargasso Sea. Just as the unfailing fall of dead leaves has brought about a forest loving clique of brown and russet colored small folk—frogs, crickets, lizards, birds and mammals which spend much of their life hiding beneath or living upon the brown dead leaves, so this never-ending drift of weed has evolved about it a little world of life, a microcosmos of great intimacy, striving by imitation of frond and berry and color to avoid some of the host of enemies forever on the lookout.

It is possible to place a bit of weed in a tumbler of salt water and have a dozen people examine it without seeing anything but a yellowish brown frond with many long, narrow leaves and a number of berry-like structures. Here and there are patches of thin ivory-white shells—tiny whorls glued closely to the surface of the leaves. Yet on this same small piece of weed there may be several good-sized crabs, slug-like creatures, shrimps and a fish two or three inches in length. Until they move, the eye is powerless to detach them. No two are alike; the little frog-fish is mottled and striped, with many small flabby filaments, and apparently ragged fins, with curious hand-like fore limbs which clutch the fronds closely. The pipe-fish and sea-horses are draped and ragged, and splashed with yellow and brown, the slugs are simply flaccid stems or leaves, and the crabs are beyond belief, living bits of weed. Some are clear yellow, others are mottled, others again have white enameled spots like the small masses of tiny shells. The little shrimps are mere ghosts of life, transparent, yielding to every movement of the water—altogether marvelous. Then there are other beings, blue like the sea, white like the foam, or translucent bits of disembodied organs. This is all absorbingly wonderful, but the unreality of this little world's existence, the remembrance of its instability is always present, and the tragedy of the immediate future looms large.

The weed along the coast is honest growth, with promise of permanence. The great floating Sargasso Sea is permanent only in appearance, and when finally the big masses drift, with all their lesser, attendant freight into the gulf stream, then life becomes a sham. There can be no more fruiting or sustained development of gas-filled berries. No eggs of fish or crabs will hatch, no new generation of sea-horses or mollusks appear among the stems. Bravely the fronds float along, day by day the hundred little lives breathe and feed and cling to their drifting home. But soon the gas berries decay and the fronds sink lower and lower. As the current flows northward, and the water becomes colder the crabs move less rapidly, the fish nibble less eagerly at the bits of passing food. Soon a sea-horse lets go and falls slowly downward, to be snapped up at once or to sink steadily into the eternal dusk and black night of deeper fathoms. Soon the plant follows and like all its chilled pensioners, dies. The supply from the Sargasso Sea seems unfailing, but one's sympathies are touched by these little assemblages, so teeming with the hope of life, all doomed by the current which is at once their support, their breath and their kismet.

But all these creatures, interesting as they are, form but a tithe of the life existing around and beneath the ship. Night after night I lean over the bow and watch the phosphorescence flare and flash beneath the surface, the disturbance of the steamer's approach springing a myriad of these floating mines, whose explosions, gentler than those of human make, merely vibrate into a splendor of visibility. How to capture these tiny beings which the eye can scarcely resolve is a matter far more difficult than the netting of the seaweed. I try to plan, then give it up. I walk restlessly over the vessel, seeking some method. But, as is often the case, nature had fairly to force the solution upon me. Thoreau says somewhere, "A trout in the milk is pretty good circumstantial evidence," and in similar guise I saw the light. Early one morning I was paddling in my salt-water bath, thinking of the coming week when I should be able to dive into island harbors from the deck, when I sat up suddenly at the sight of a tiny fish disporting himself with me in the tub. At least I needed no further hint, and as I scooped up the little being my plan was made. By exhaustive inquiry among the feminine portion of the passengers I obtained possession of a small square of a very fine-meshed fabric something like bolting cloth. In the evening, with the assurance of a small monetary liaison with the bath steward, I tied this bit of cloth over the salt-water nozzle and carefully set the faucet so that a dribble of water trickled forth. In the morning the cloth strainer contained a small blob of grayish jelly. This I dropped into a tumbler and saw the water cloud with an opalescent mist of a myriad motes and I knew that my plan was successful. No matter how tempestuous the sea, or at what speed the ship throbbed through the water, I would always be able to gather any amount of the wonderful floating life of the ocean—the phosphorescent plankton—for my microscope. Again, aside from my own edification, I was able to give some thrills to my fellow passengers, and I have had twenty or more lined up for a squint at the weird things of the open sea. In spite of my reassurances, there was reported to be less enthusiasm for the daily bath, and much suspicious inspection of the clear ocean tub water as a result of glimpses of the concentrated cosmos in my tumblers.

I can recall many similar diversions and discoveries of new possibilities of life on board ship, but one brings memories of especial delight. Next to the crow's nest the bow is, for me, the place of greatest joy—the spot where each moment one's eyes reach forward into a trackless, unexplored field of view; a heaving, translucent No Man's Land, fraught with potentialities such as sea-serpents. Long had I pondered the possibility of getting nearer the fascinating bit of unbroken water just ahead. At last a scheme unfolded itself, but not until a following trip when I had made all preparations did I venture to ask permission of the Captain. For I knew better than to wish to add anything to the responsibility of this official. When he had become used to my eccentric use of the deck and the bath tubs, I unfolded my new plan, and thanks to my preparation, met with no opposition. I had a waistcoat made of stout leather straps, with a heavy ring behind to which I attached a strong rope. This tethered to the rail, in the extreme bow, enabled me to swarm safely down until I reached the flukes of the great anchor. Seating myself comfortably, I lashed my leather straps fast, and was ready for work with glass or net or camera. Of course this was possible only on comparatively calm days, but when the sea was mirror-like, with only the low, heaving swells bending its surface, and the flying fish flushed before us in schools, then I had days of good sport.

This novel method of anchor perching led indirectly to the solution of a very different puzzle. I had been thinking and talking of the congested turmoil of the great city far below the horizon to the north. Looking back on a year in its midst, memory, aroused by present contrasts, registered sham, insincerity, deceit, illusion, veneer as dominant notes in civilization. In an argument one evening I had held that deceit or illusion was not of necessity evil, nor when unconsciously self-imposed, even reprehensible.

The next day I instanced a rather apt example. Our very knowledge, our mental mastery leads us to false sensory assertions, which become so universal that they develop into apparent truisms. Only by a distinct effort may we summon them to consciousness and correctly orient them. It is not without a wrench that we set aside the evidence of our senses and realize the proof which physics offers. We watch the glorious "sunset" and to disillusion our minds require to repeat again and again that it is the earth which is heaving upward, the horizon which is eclipsing the sun and the sky of day. I once persuaded a group of passengers to speak only of the evening's "earth-rise" and in three or four days this term had become reasonable, and almost lost its strangeness.

One finds numerous examples of these sensory deceits at sea; our senses are at fault in every direction. The wind flutters the fins of the flying fish and we think they actually fly. The tropic sea, under the palest of green skies, is saturated ultramarine, save where the propellers churn it to pea-green, yet in our bath the water is clear and colorless.

My most interesting oceanic illusion, was a personal one, a result of memory. I looked about the ship and felt that this at least was wholly sincere; it was made to fulfil every function and it achieved its destiny day by day, finally and completely. I had never sailed on a vessel of this name before, the "Yamaro," and yet at certain moments an oblique glance brought a flash of memory, of a familiar hatchway, a rail which fitted snugly under one's elbows, a stretch of open deck which seemed too much of a known path for these few days' acquaintance. As I talked with the Trinidad negro lookout on the forward deck, I saw a brass coolie plate roll out of the galley, and I wondered. There were only negroes among the crew. Then one day I donned my leather waistcoat and climbed down to my anchor flukes, and my mystery was solved. In clear new letters the name of the vessel appeared along the side of the bow above me, but a second glance showed me something else: a palimpsest of old corroded sites of four letters, painted out, which once had sent their message to so many inquiring eyes: Pegu.

Long ago, on trips of unalloyed happiness, I had traveled between Colombo and Rangoon on this selfsame steamer, which now, caught in some unusual stress of distant demand of war, had with her sister ships been taken from her route in the Far East and settled to her new routine.

So even the ship beneath me was not what she had seemed, and yet her deceit and illusion were harmless, wholly without guile, and I began to wonder whether my unfriendly thoughts of the great city behind me were quite fair.

The carven Wodens and Brünnhildes who guarded the fortunes of old Viking ships, watched the icy Arctic waters forever cleft beneath them and felt the sting of flying splinters of ice; the figureheads of Gloucester merchantmen of old, with wind blown draperies and pious hands, counted the daily and monthly growth of barnacles, and noted the lengthening of the green fronds on the hull below. One day I lay in the great arms of an anchor, beneath a prosaic bow; myself the only figurehead, peering gargoyle-wise over the new-painted steel. Far below, in place of wooden virgin or muscled Neptune, there appeared only four numbers, 2, 3, 4 and 25. Even these, however, yielded to imagination when I remembered that the light cargo which made them visible was due to the need of sugar by soldiers in far distant trenches.

The great unlovely bow rose and reached forward and settled until, as I lay face downward, our speed seemed increased many fold. And I wondered if the set wooden expression which always marked the figurehead ladies and gods had not its origin in the hypnotic joy of forever watching the molten cobalt crash into alabaster, this to emerald, then to merge again into the blue which is a hue born of depth and space and not of pigment. And now I forgot the plunging bow beneath and the schools of toy biplanes, the strange little grasshopper-like fish which burst from the ultramarine, unstained, full-finned and banked sharply outward for their brief span of flight. I looked up and saw pale-green shallows, a thread of silver surf and the rounded mountains of a tropical island. And I frowned with impatience—something that more reliable figureheads never did—for the island, teeming with interest, with exciting birds, and fascinating people, had been spoiled for me. Force of circumstance had shuffled me inextricably into a pack (I use the simile advisedly) of insufferable tourists. Effeminate men, childish women and spoiled children diluted or wholly eclipsed every possible scene. The obvious was made blatant, the superficial was imagined subtle, the glories of silent appreciation were shattered by garrulous nothings. At the thought of such fellow countrymen I hid my face and strived with all my might to obliterate the remembrance. Soothed by the rise and thrust of the great ship's bow and the intermittent roar of the steel-born breaker beneath, I rested motionless.

When at last I roused, it was with a start at the altered scene. It seemed as if my thought—Buddha-powerful—had actually wrought the magic of widespread change. The alabaster breaker was there, but oxidized, dulled; the cobalt had become gray-black, and by the same alchemy the emerald shallows were reset with a mosaic of age-dimmed jade. Most of all was the island changed. From strand to cloud-capped peak, the tone was purple. In high lights it hued to dull silver-gray, in the shadows it deadened to utter black. Rugged and sheer Mont Pelee drew upwards, its head in cloud, its feet in the sea—the shadow-gray sea. My eye strove to penetrate the cloud and picked from its heart a thread of black among the gray lava, which, dropping downward, enlarged to a ribbon and then to a gully. In ugly angles and sharp, unreasonable bends it zigzagged down the shoulder of the great cinderous mountain. Before I realized it my gully became a gorge and ended at the edge of the dark waters, as black and as mysterious as it had begun.

Idly, I lay and watched the silver shuttle of coral-shattered foam weaving the warp and woof of the rising tide along the whole length of shore. This seemed the only bit of land in the whole world. Was it the first—or the last—to appear above the waters? It might have been either, until, suddenly I saw a movement among what I had taken for huge, crater-spewed boulders, but which I now knew for the weathered remains of a city. From between two walls of this city of the dead came slowly into view the last human being in the world—or so the surroundings suggested. Yet a second glance belied this, for her mission was fraught with hope. Even at this distance I could discern her stately carriage, swinging and free, her black countenance and her heavy burden. At the very edge of the water she stopped, lifted down the basket piled with black volcanic débris and emptied it. She stood up, looked steadily out at the passing steamer and vanished among the shadows of the ruins. It was startlingly like the first grain of sand which an ant brings out after a passing heel has crushed its nest. But however vivid the simile, the dominant thought was hope. At least one ant had faith in a new ant-nest of the future, and the somber picture of the negress, her basket of black lava poured into the equally black waters, was suddenly framed in high relief by the thought of a new St. Pierre. The great mountain still rumbled and smoked. One at least believed in a home in its very shadows.

But the end was not yet. The island had been for me unhappily visited; its passing had been a sudden, wonderfully dynamic vision. And now I shut my eyes again to strive to interpret and to fix indelibly in mind this vision and all the network of thoughts it wove. Again the roar from below and the gentle rise and forward surge calmed and rested me. And the thought of the unhappy morning was become dim and carried no resentment.

Ten minutes later I looked up again and found all changed—no ruthless, startling shift of values, but a subtle, all-wonderful transformation. Pelee should still have loomed high, the craters and gullys were but a short distance away and indeed all were faintly discernible. A faint veil of azure had intervened. There was no wind, it had neither drifted in from the sea nor frayed from the edges of the dense cloud which enveloped the peak. So evanescent, so delicate was this still-born haze that the crater cloud was only softened, not eclipsed. From the strong sweep and stroke and virile outline of a Brangwyn or the gnomesque possibilities of a Rackham, the great mountain softened to the ethereal air castle of a Parrish. Between winks, as imperceptibly as the coming of twilight to a cloudless sky, the vision changed to a veritable Isle of Death. This seemed too evanescent, too ethereally fragile to endure, and yet for moment after moment it held and held—and then the mountain—which was yet but the shadow of a mountain—this itself dissolved, and over the gently heaving sea, were neither lava flows nor cinders, gorges nor ruins, but only a faint pearly-white mist, translucent, permeable, floating softly between sea and sky. Martinique had vanished—had dissolved—there was no longer any land above the waters.

Dusk settled quickly and the vision remained unbroken. All my sensory relations with the world seemed inverted. My actual contact with the island had passed into happy forgetfulness; the coastal vision was more vivid and real, and now, the essence of memory, the vital, tangible retrospect was forever bound up in the final vanishing, the very evaporation of this island—lapped by the sea—the sea which tomorrow's sun would fill with the glorious hue of sapphires—the sapphires of Kashmir.

III

ISLANDS

With thrice seven-league boots one could stride from the coast of the United States and with a dozen steps reach British Guiana dry-shod. From an aviator's seat, the chain of West Indies, Windward and Leeward Islands curves gracefully southwards, like stepping-stones across a Japanese stream. If, corresponding to this annihilation of space, we could abbreviate minutes, hours and days as in a moving-picture film, we might have the edifying spectacle of our steamer's trip reduced to a succession of loops, ricochetting from island after island, as a stone skips along the surface of the water, sliding along those dotted lines which are so characteristic a feature of coasts in our school geographies, and coming to rest at last with a splash in the muddy current off the Georgetown stelling.

Our steamer is preferable to the seven-league trip, for we thereby omit the big, cumbersome West Indies. It is a curious fact that any land projecting above the surface of the water is interesting and exciting in inverse ratio to its size. The endless New Jersey shore moves one not at all, while the single volcanic cone of Nevis brings thrills and emotions; Cuba is wearisome as one steams slowly past headland after headland, while Sombrero—a veritable oceanic speck of dust—stimulates the imagination to the highest pitch. It seems as if our Ego enlarges as our immediate terrestrial cosmos diminishes. In studying the birds of the endless jungles of the South American continent my interest never flags, yet it never quite attains the nth power of enthusiasm which accompanies the thought of the possibility of locating every nest on St. Thomas. This love of small islands must savor of the joy of possible completeness in achievement, plus a king's sensations, plus some of those of Adam!

Any guide book will give the area, population, amusements, best hotels (or the least objectionable ones), summary of history and the more important exports. But no one has ever attempted to tell of the soul of these islands—or even of the individuality of each, which is very real and very distinct. Some day this will be done, and the telling will be very wonderful, and will use up most of the superlatives in our language. For my part I may only search my memory for some little unimportant scene which lives again when the name of the island is spoken—and string these at random on pages, like the chains of little scarlet and black sea-beans which glisten in the fingers of the negresses, held up in hope of sale from their leaky boats, rocking on the liquid emerald around the steamer.

St. Thomas, or How I Was Taught to Catch Lizards by a Danish Flapper.—Nearly a week had passed since we began to exchange a sleety winter for the velvety tropics, to traverse the latitude spectrum of ocean from drab-gray to living turquoise. As on every trip, it was early morning when the long undulating profile of St. Thomas reared itself lazily from the sea, and almost at once, flocks of great-winged booby-gannets began to wheel and veer around the ship, banking in a way to make an aviator's blood leap.

From a dusky monochrome the land resolved into shades, and slowly into colors—gray volcanic rocks, dry yellow turf and green patches of trees. Then contours became traceable, smooth rounded shoulders of hills frayed out into jagged strata, with the close-shaven fur of bushes and shrubs, and occasional tall slender palms reminding one of single hydroids on the sargasso fronds. A thread of smoke drifting free from a palm grove was the first sign of life, and after a few minutes of twisting and turning, the steamer nosed out her circuitous channel, and from the very heart of the island the great crater harbor opened before us.

The beautiful hills rolled up and upward, and to their feet Charlotte Amalie, crowned with Bluebeard's castle, clung obliquely, her streets climbing with astonishing steepness. The little town was newly roofed, all the picturesque old red ones having been ripped off in the last hurricane. The houses were as flat, quite as like cardboard theatrical scenery as ever.

At the sight of a distant flag I endeavored to thrill patriotically at the thought that this island was now a part of the United States. I would have been more successful, however, if I could have recalled the vision of some fellow countryman in far distant time, landing on these slopes and taking possession by right of discovery. Even if some burly, semi-piratical American adventurer had annexed it for his president by feat of arms, my blood would have flowed less calmly than it did at the thought of so many millions of dollars paid as droit de possession. However, a tropic bird flew past and put the lesser matter out of mind.

As always, near the wharf thrived the same little open bar-room, with its floral-bedecked mirrors, selling good beer and vile soda. Aside from a flag here and there, the only sign of the change of nationality was several motorcycles with side cars which American soldiers drove like Jehu through the narrow streets, hustling natives and their tiny carts and ponies to one side, and leaving enduring trains of gasoline-scented dust. A few minutes' walk up one of the steep streets and all was quiet and unhurried, and the sense of a yet undigested possession, of embarrassing novelty of purchase, slipped aside and we knew that St. Thomas was still the unspoiled little island which the slow mellowing growth of West Indian evolution had made it. We climbed slowly up the steep road toward Mafolie, and behind us the glory of this wonderful island unfolded and spread, the roofs of the town shifting into strange geometric figures, and the harbor circle widening. We passed pleasant sunburned Danes and negroes driving tiny burros laden with small fagots and with grass. At one turn a tamarind tree was in full blossom, and here were gathered all the hummingbirds and butterflies of the island, or so it seemed. At last we reached a ravine, dry as everything else at this season on the island, and walked slowly up it, catching butterflies. They were in great numbers and gayly colored. The strangest sight was hundreds of large, brown millipedes clinging to the stems of bushes and small trees, apparently finding more moisture in the steady tradewinds than in the soil, which even under large stones, was parched and dry: dragonflies were abundant, but the dominant forms of insect life were butterflies and spiders.

The road wound over the top of the ridge and from its summit we looked down on the other half of the island. No house or trace of cultivation was visible and the beauty of the view was beyond adequate description. Rolling, comfortably undulating hills were below us, and in front a taller, rounded one like the head of some wearied tropical giant. Beyond this, a long curved arm of richest green had been stretched carelessly out into the sea, inclosing a bay, which from our height, looked like a small pool, but such a pool as would grace a Dunsany tale. It was limpid, its surface like glass and of the most exquisite turquoise. Its inner rim was of pure white sand, a winding line bounding turquoise water and the rich, dark green of the sloping land in a flattened figure three. I never knew before that turquoise had a hundred tints and shades, but here the film nearest the sand was unbelievably pale and translucent, then a deeper sheen overlaid the surface, while the center of the pool was shaded with the indescribable pigment of sheer depth. In a great frame of shifting emerald and cobalt, set a shining blue wing of a morpho butterfly and you can visualize this wonder scene.

Outside the encircling green arm, the water of ocean glowed ultramarine in the slanting sunlight, and stretched on and on to the curving horizon of Atlantis. The scene seemed the essence of peace, and to the casual glance hardly a cloud moved. I sat for a long time and let every part of my retina absorb the glory of colors. Soon motion and life became apparent. Shadows shifted softly across the surface, bringing hues of delicate purplish blue, memory tints of open ocean, and against these darkened tones a thousand specks of white glowed and inter-weaved like a maze of motes in a shaft of sunlight. In imagination we could enlarge them to a swarm of silvery bees, and then my glasses resolved them into gannets—great sea birds with wings six feet from tip to tip—an astounding hint of the actual distance and depth below me of this pool-like bay. An hour later the sunlight left the turquoise surface, and its blueness darkened and strengthened and became opaque, although it was a long time before sunset, and the ocean beyond kept all its brilliance.

My eye was drawn to two tiny dots on the sandy rim. I could just make out that they were moving and guessed them to be dogs or chickens. The glasses made magic again and split up each group into a triumvirate of little burros which trotted along, and presently turned into an invisible side trail. Perhaps the most fascinating discovery of motion was that of the water's edge. To the eye there were neither waves nor ripples, but careful scrutiny through the strong prisms showed a rhythmical approach and receding, a gentle breathlike pulsation which regularly darkened and uncovered a thread of sand. I forgot the busy little town on the other side of the island, the commerce and coaling and the distant echo of war, and giving a last look at the tarnished turquoise pool, the resentment of financial acquisition of such beauty softened, and I felt glad that I had indirectly some small tithe of ownership, as well as the complete memory monopoly of the glories of this passing day.

As I made my way down the ravine, the fascinating island lizards scrambled about or watched me knowingly from rock or tree-trunk. As usual I wrecked my net in striving to sweep them into it, and bruised my fingers in vain efforts to seize their slender forms. Rarely I succeeded; usually I found but a bit of tail in my fingers, or a handful of loose bark, while, just out of reach, they would halt and look me over derisively with their bright intelligent eyes. At the roadside I came suddenly upon a little Danish girl of about twelve years, dancing excitedly with a lizard dangling from the end of a slender grass stem.

Her blue eyes flashed with excitement, her yellow pigtail flew wildly about as she danced and backed away, fearful of touching the little lizard, and yet too fascinated to drop it and allow it to escape. I took it up and found it had been captured with a neat slip noose. She said it was easy to catch them and showed me how, and before I reached the wharf I had a dozen of the interesting little chaps stored in various pockets. Thus after years of effort a little Danish school girl solved my problem for me. Acting on this hint I tried fine hair wire, but nothing proved as effective as the thin, pliant but strong stems of grass.

It is surprising how difficult it is to touch these little reptiles and yet how easy to noose them. At the approach of hand or net they are off faster than the eye can follow, yet they are merely interested in the waving grass. Even when by an awkward motion one flicks their nose, they merely shake their heads or shift a step or two. They detect no connection between the moving grass and the more distant hand that wields it.

Bound to the ground by their short scales and four limbs, these small lizards are yet remarkably birdlike in their vivacity and their enthusiastic playing of their little game of life. Every motion is registered by quick wrenlike movements and by the changing play of colors over their scales, while when particularly excited, they puff out a comical dewlap of yellow and orange skin beneath their throat. Thanks to my flapper acquaintance I am now on more equal terms with the little scaly people of the islands, and can study their puzzling color problems at close range.

Looking back at Bluebeard's and Blackbeard's castles from the deck of our vessel as we slowly steamed from the harbor, some one asked when the last pirate plied his trade. I looked ashore at the fort and guns, I listened to the warning bugle, I watched the scattered lights vanish, leaving all of the town in darkness, I saw our own darkened portholes and shaded lights. As my mind went to the submarines which inspired all these precautions, as I recalled the sinister swirl in the Atlantic which had threatened us more than once on my return from the battle-front, I could answer truly that Bluebeard and his ilk were worthily represented at the present day. Indeed, of the two enemies, I found much more to condone in the ignorance and the frank primitive brutality of the pirate of past centuries, than in the prostituted science and camouflaged kultur of the teutonic ishmaelite of today.

St. Kitts, a Plunge, Exploration and Monkeys.—I came on deck at daybreak and found the sea like a mirror. Even the clouds were undisturbed, resting quietly in the mountain valleys of St. Eustatius, and on the upper slopes of St. Kitts in the distance. The tropical morning was a lazy one, and the engines seemed to throb in a half-somnolent manner. I folded up into a deck chair and idly watched the beautiful profile of the island astern.

Suddenly the sea became alive with virile beings—curving steel-gray bodies which shot forth like torpedoes from some mighty battery. I thrilled in every fiber and the sloth of the tropics fell from me as if by a galvanic shock: the dolphins had come! Usually they appear in their haunts between Dominica and Martinique or off the latter island, but here they were in dozens, leaping for breath with the regularity of machinery. Now and then the spirit of play would possess one and he vaulted high in air, ten feet above the surface, twisted and fell broadside with a slap which could be heard a half-mile away. Then several simultaneously did the same thing. A school would come close alongside, slacken speed to that of the vessel, and now and then dive beneath and appear off the opposite quarter. Another trick was for one or two to station themselves just ahead of the bow and remain motionless, urged on by the pressure of the water from behind. It was very unexpected and very splendid to have this battalion of magnificent cetaceans, bursting with vital energy and fullness of life, injected without warning into the calm quiet of this tropical sea.

We anchored off Basseterre and waited in vain for the doctor. There seemed no chance of landing for some time, so several of us dived off and swam about the ship for an hour. The joy of this tropical water is something which can be communicated only by experience. It was so transparent that in diving one hardly knew the moment he would enter it. Paddling along just beneath the surface, there was a constant temptation to reach down and grasp the waving seaferns and bits of coral which seemed only just out of reach, whereas they were a good thirty feet beneath. Whether floating idly or barging clumsily along in the only fashion possible to us terrestrial humans, we longed for the sinuous power of the dolphins, whose easy sculling imparts such astounding impetus. Now and then we saw a deep swimming fish, but the line of envious fellow voyagers along the ship's rail were denied all this joy by reason of their fear of sharks. They had read in many books and they had listened to many tales, and they do not know what we shared with the little nigger boys who dive for pennies—the knowledge that the chance of an attack from a shark is about equal to that of having your ears sewed up by devil's darning needles. Over all the world I have swum among sharks; from Ceylon to the Spanish Main I have talked intimately with scores of native captains and sailors and learned the difference between what they tell to the credulous tourist and what they believe in their hearts.

In time the St. Kitts doctor arrived, and, as he rowed past, looked at us critically as if he suspected us of infecting the waters of the sea with some of those mysteriously terrible diseases which he is always hoping for on the ship's papers, but never seems to find.

Walking hastily through the town, we reached the first of the great sugar-cane fields, and skirting these diagonally came ever nearer the sloping base of the high land. Ravines are always interesting for they cannot be cultivated, and it was up one of these lava and water-worn gullies that we began to climb Monkey Hill. We went slowly, for there were many absorbing things on the way. Palm swifts swooped about, while noisy kingbirds gleaned as industriously but with shorter flights. Heavy-billed anis whaleeped and fluttered clumsily ahead of us; honey creepers squeaked and small black finches watched us anxiously. From a marshy pool half a dozen migrating sandpipers flew up and circled down to the shore. Every shrubby field was alive with butterflies of many kinds and the vigorous shaking of each bush yielded excellent harvests of strange insects which fell into the open umbrella held beneath. In a grove of wild mango and acacias were hosts of green filigree butterflies, dropping and swirling from the foliage like falling leaves, the comparison being heightened by the brown spots, like fungus blotches, which were etched upon their wings.

Leaving the ravine we climbed over great lateral shoulders of the mountain, grassy slopes with bold outjutting rocks, and rarely a clump of small shrubs, bringing to mind the lower foothills of Garhwal and Kashmir. Higher still came dense shrubby growths, much of it thorny, seamed by our narrow trail, and threaded here and there by glowing fronds of golden shower orchids. Ground doves perched on low branches and an occasional big pigeon whistled past. From the summit a wonderful view stretched out—the long, sloping green cane-fields, the clustered roofs, and beyond the curving beaches, the blue water with our vessel resting at anchor. Now came a search for monkeys, regardless of thorns and rough stones, for, strange though it sounds, St. Kitts possesses many of these animals. Whatever the accident of their arrival, they are firmly established and work much havoc in the small hours, among gardens and sugar-cane. Our efforts were in vain. We heard the scolding chatter of one of the small simians, and were preparing to surround him, when a warning blast from the ship summoned us and we packed up our collection of insects and flowers, munched our last piece of chocolate and began to clamber down the great sun-drenched slopes.

Martinique, or a New Use for an Eight of Hearts.—Columbus thought that this island was inhabited only by women, and to this day the market place bears out the idea. It is a place apart from all the rest of the city. In early morning, before the gaudy shutters were taken down, the streets were quiet—the callous soles of the passersby made the merest velvet shuffling and only an occasional cry of the vendor of some strange fruit or cakes broke the stillness. When yet half a block away from the market one became aurally aware of it. The air was filled with a subdued hum, an indefinite murmur which might as well be the sound of tumbling waters as of human voices. It was a communal tongue, lacking individual words, accent and grammar, and yet containing the essence of a hundred little arguments, soliloquies, pleadings, offers and refusals. After the aural came the olfactory zone, and none may describe this, so intermingled that fish and vegetables, spice and onions were only to be detected when one approached their respective booths.

The details of market life hold the possibilities of epic description; the transactions of a stock exchange pale into mediocrity when compared with the noise and excitement when a sixpence changes hands between Martinique negresses.

All the sales in the market were of the smallest quantities; little silver was seen, pennies, ha'pennies and sous composing all the piles of coppers. The colors of the fruits were like flowers, melons white with a delicate fretwork of green; brilliant touches of red peppers like scarlet passion flowers; tiny bits of garlic lilac-tinted. The fish had the hues of sunsets on their scales, and the most beautiful, the angelfish, were three for a penny, while the uglier, more edible ones, were sixpence each. Beauty was rated at inverse value here.

Around and around the iron fence which bounded the market place, paced a pitiful pair—a tiny black mite who could not have passed three summers, leading by the hem of an ample black skirt an old blind woman. After several halting steps they would hesitate and the gaunt hand would be thrust through the bars begging for market refuse. Once the gods were kind and a bit of melon and a spotted mango were given, but more often alms was asked of an empty stall, or within sight only of a tethered duck or chicken. Some of the gifts were no better than the garbage over which the pair stepped.

We sat in chairs in a tiny pharmacist shop—the artist and I—and were at once the center of a chattering, staring throng, a kaleidoscope of shifting colors. We shoved and dismissed to no avail, then the owner of the shop with a gentle "permitte-moi" threw a pailful of "not-too-clean" water over the crowd, including the artist and myself. The mob scattered shrieking and for a short time the surrounding space was open. Soon a larger crowd gathered, with the still dripping units of the first assemblage smiling expectantly in the offing, hovering at a safe distance. The second dispersal had a legal origin; the market policeman stole quietly along the wall of the shop and hurled himself like a catapult, butting goatlike into the heart of the crowd. A half-dozen fat negresses toppled over, and cassava, tin cups and stray fishes flew about. Even those who lost all their purchases showed no resentment but only a roaring appreciation of the joke. In this rush we were almost upset with the crowd, and we began to look forward with dread to any more strenuous defense of our comfort.

The little French mulatto pharmacist who was responsible for the occasional joyful outbursts of eau, seemed to profit by our presence, for a number of interested onlookers who had pushed into the shop to watch us from behind, when cornered and hailed by the irate owner, stammeringly asked for some small thing, by the purchase of which they bought their liberty. The regular business of this little shop alone was worthy one's whole attention. A prescription was being pounded up in a mortar and when the clerk reached out for a scoop and for something to scrape the sides clean, an eight of hearts was the nearest and with this the chemicals were mixed. Within the next fifteen minutes eight or ten different prescriptions, powders and crystals were measured, shaken, mixed and scraped by the same eight of hearts, and the combination of ingredients which the last purchaser obtained must surely have had some radical effect on his system—salubrious or otherwise.

Then came the unusual one—the super person who is always to be discovered sooner or later. Externally she was indistinguishable from the host of her sisters. She was garbed in a wrapper, flowing and reaching the ground, purple, and pocked with large white spots. A diminutive turban of yellow and red madras was surmounted by an ancient and crownless straw hat, but at the first word she was revealed. A British subject, she was here at the eruption fifteen years ago. That day she and one of her daughters happened to be far away from St. Pierre. When the explosion came, she was outside the danger zone, but her husband, son and other daughter were burned to death. She regretted the impoliteness of the French here and apologized for them for crowding us. Later she brought a gift of rose bananas to Mary Hammond, saying that Americans had given her food and clothes when she lost everything.

The crowd was curious, thoughtless, selfish, with the dominant hope of a laugh at some one's expense. Here was one who sought us out, who left unguarded her little tray of bananas and garlic to speak a word of thanks, to present a handful of fruit which in her station was a munificent gift, and who was satisfied and grateful with our sincere appreciation. She has sisters in graciousness over all the world, but they are rare and widely scattered, like the Akawai Indian squaw who gave me her last cassava, like the wrinkled Japanese crone who persuaded her son to become one of my best servants, like the wife of the headman of an isolated village in Yunnan, who from among her sodden, beastlike neighbors came forth and offered fowls and vegetables with a courteous spirit worthy of any station in life.

St. Lucia, a Study in Contrasts.—Each time I have visited Castries it has seemed more somber and less pleasant. It is colorless because it is full of coal and no change of weather brings amelioration. When the sun fills the air with a blinding glare and palpitating heat waves (as it occasionally does), each step raises a cloud of coal dust, and when the tropical rain falls in a steady downpour (as it usually does), the whole world seems covered with coal mud, as if about to dissolve into some carboniferous slime.

This is an important military and coaling station, which perhaps explains much. Military exigency compelled me to procure a special pass from the Chief of Police to paddle about its dreary streets, and which strictly forbade my climbing the comparatively clean and attractive mountains beyond these streets. As a coaling station I am sure of its success and popularity, for the coal carriers who comprise most of the natives, have apparently no time to wash between steamers. So intensive was the grime that the original dark hue of their skins offered no camouflage to the anthracite palimpsest which overlaid it. Such huge negro women, such muscles, such sense of power, I had never before sensed. I should dislike, were I an official of St. Lucia, to take any decided stand on an anti-feminine platform. So saturated are the people in coal, such is their lack of proper perspective of this material, they seem actually to be unconscious of its presence. Returning on board, one passes the Seaview Hotel, about which coal is piled to a much greater height than the roof. Such abstraction is worthy of mention at least.

Amid the memory of all the dirt and damp, dull sadness, two things were unforgetable, as untouched diamonds glisten in their matrix of wet blue clay. Amid sodden clothes, unwashed hands and bestial faces, a trayful of rainbow fishes gleamed opalwise—coral, parrot and angelfish, all awaiting some unsavory purchaser. Then came the little French negress, selling fans, out of the ruck of sexless bearers of coal. When we answered her appeal with a "Non merci," her face lighted up at the courtesy of the words; "Voyons!" said she, "comme c'est gracieusement refusé!" No mortal could have resisted buying her wares after such delicate sentiment.

About five in the afternoon we parted from the gritty wharf and steamed for hour after hour along the shore. We forgot the poor, filthy, ill-mannered coal carriers, and the thought of the misery and squalor of the town passed with its vanishing, still clad in its cloak of rain. As the natives appeared to us so inferior to those of the other islands, so by some law of compensation the coast was revealed correspondingly beautiful. At four bells the sun sank on the side away from the island, in a blaze of yellow and orange with one particular cloud touching the water line with flame color, as if a mighty distant volcano had just reared its head above the sea, still in the throes of molten erection. On the opposite side were passing the dark green headlands and fiords of the land, while upward, high into the sky, there arose now and then some tremendous cloud, on fire with rich rose or salmon afterglow, or a maze of other tints defying human name or pigment. In front was the living blue water dulled by the dimming light and above all the transparent blue of the tropic sky.

Without warning, from out of the soft folded edges of one of the filmy clouds, crept a curved edge of cold steel, like some strange kind of floating shell coming forth from its cloud of smoke, and a moment later the full moon was revealed, unlike any other color note in this marvelous scene. The icy, unchanging moon craters, the more plastic island mountains fringed by the wind-shapen trees, the still more shifting waters and the evanescent cloud mist, all were played upon and saturated and stained by colors which were beyond words, almost beyond our appreciation. Tiny villages, fronted by canoes and swathed in feathery cocoanut fronds, snuggled at the foot of great volcanic and coral cliffs.

But the crowning glory was reserved for the last, when we surged past the Trois Pitons, rearing their majestic heads above all the island, hundreds and hundreds of feet into the sky. Even the moon could not top one, and after cutting into sharp, silver silhouette every leaf and branch of a moon-wide swath of trees, it buried itself behind the peak and framed the whole mountain.

A small wandering rain storm drifted against the tallest piton and split in two, one half going away down the coast and the rest passing close enough to us to shower the decks with drops. As it fell astern, it spread out fanwise and in its heart developed a ghostly lunar rainbow—the spectrum cleansed and denuded of all the garish colors of day. At first we could only sense which was the warm, which the cold side of the bow, then it strengthened and the red appeared as dull copper or amber buff, and the violet as a deeper, colder blue, cloud hue. All the time, even when the rain was falling heaviest, the moon shone with full strength, and when at last we veered away from this wonder island, it was so high that there was no moonpath on the water, but only a living, shifting patch of a million electric wires, which wrote untold myriad messages in lunar script upon the little waves. From one fraction of time to another, the eye could detect and hold in memory innumerable strange figures, and the resemblance, if it be not sacrilege to make any simile, was only to script of languages long, long dead—the cuneiform of Babylon and the tendril spirals of Pali.

Once a faint light appeared upon the distant shore. Our steamer spoke in a short, sharp blast which thrilled us with its unexpectedness and the signal among the palms was quenched. From the great things of the cosmos, from brilliant Venus, and from the north star low in the sky, from the new splendor of Formalhaut, rising ever higher in the south, our thoughts were forced back to the littlenesses of the world war, whose faint influence reached even thus far to break the thread of our abstraction.

Barbados, in Eclipse and in Sun.—The vagaries of a naturalist are the delight of the uninitiated, and impress simple natives more than immoderate tips or the routine excesses of tourist folk. One's scientific eccentricities may even establish a small measure of fame, or rather notoriety. So it was that as I walked up the landing stage at Bridgetown, a small ebon personality pointed finger at me and confided to his neighbor, "See de mon—de tall mon da—he de mon who chase tree lizards in de cemetry!"

"Yes, George," I said, "I'm de mon who chased them with you two years ago, but this time we shall catch them as well."

"Anyting you say true, Boss, I'se yo boy."

But as is always true in sport, certainty robs it of the finest element of excitement, and our successful stalks that afternoon with grass stem nooses were less memorable than the frantic tree circlings and grave hurdlings of two years before.

On our return from the cemetery a breeze swept up from the sea, the palm fronds slithered against one another, and I suddenly caught myself shivering. The moment I became conscious of this I thought of fever and wondered if my life-long immunity had come to an end. Then I observed old hags wrapping themselves up; my eyes suddenly readjusted, I perceived that the glaring sunlight was tempered; again the strange mid-day breeze arose and finally I realized that I was witnessing an eclipse of the sun on the island of Barbados. The natives and the birds and even the patient little donkeys grew restless, the light became weaker and strange, and until the end of the eclipse we could think of nothing else. The most remarkable part to me, were the reflections. Looking however hastily and obliquely at the sun, I perceived nothing but a blinding glare, but walking beneath the shade of dense tropical foliage, the hosts of specks of sunlight sifting through, reflected on the white limestone, were in reality thousands of tiny representations of the sun's disk incised with the segment of the silhouetted moon, but reversed, just like the image through the aperture of a pinhole camera. I suppose it is a very common physical phenomenon, but to me it was a surprising thing to trace the curve of the eclipse clearly and with ease in the sunbeams on the pavement beneath my feet, while my retinas refused to face or register the original.

Barbados is very flat, thoroughly cultivated and said to be the most densely populated bit of land in the world; all of which guide-book gossip was discouraging to a naturalist. But besides the cemetery which was sanctuary for the jolly little lizards, I found a bit of unspoilt beach, with sand as white and fine as talcum powder, where dwelt undisturbed many assemblages of small folk. There were land-crabs which had come to have at heart more affection for the vegetable gardens at the beach top than for the waters of their forefathers. They had degenerated into mere commuters from their holes to the nearest melon patch. The lower part of the beach was that ever changing zone—that altar upon which each tide deposited some offering from the depths of the sea. This will some day have a worthy interpreter, a sympathetic recorder and commentator who will make a marvelous volume of this intermittent thread of the earth's surface, pulsing, changing—now showing as water, now as land—but always vital with exciting happenings.

I sat for an hour on the upper beach and watched the little native folk, autochthones who for innumerable generations had been so loyal to their arenaceous home that the sheltering mantle of its pale hue had fallen upon their wings and bodies. Here were tiny, grayish-white crabs, here were spiders, which, until they moved, were not spiders but sand. And when they did move, recognition usually came too late to some fly, which had trespassed on this littoral hunting ground. Tiger-beetles drifted about like sand-grain wraiths, whose life wanderings lay between low tide and the highest dune; veriest ghosts of their brilliant green brethren farther inland. Ashen wasps buzzed past, with compass and maps in their heads, enabling them to circle about once or twice, alight, take a step or two and, kicking down their diminutive front door, to enter the slanting sandy tube which for them fulfilled all the requirements of home.

From an aeroplane, Barbados would appear like a circular expanse of patchwork, or a wild futurist painting set in deepest ultramarine; a maze of rectangles or squares of sugar-cane, with a scattering of sweet potatoes and sea island cotton. I got a hint of this when I motored to the highest point of land, and then climbed the steeple of the loftiest church. At my feet was the Atlantic with great breakers, reduced by distance to tiny wavelets twinkling among the black boulders and feathery palms which were scattered along shore. For more than two hundred and seventy-five years the church had stood here, and not to be outdone by the strangeness of the little beach people, the graveyard boasted the remains of a descendant of a Greek Emperor, who long ago had been warden.

But again our steamer summoned us and we left the dusky natives with their weird legends and the tiny island which they love, and were rowed steadily out beyond the two miles of shallow coast.

When we steamed away from shore that night, no lights except those of the dining saloon were allowed. Yet the path of the vessel made a mockery of this concealment. The world did not exist a hundred feet away from the ship and yet there was no mist or fog. The outward curve of the water from the bow was a long slender scimitar of phosphorescence, and from its cutting edge and tip flashed bits of flame and brilliant steely sparks, apparently suspended above the jet-black water. Alongside was a steady ribbon of dull green luminescence, while, rolling and drifting along through this path of light came now and then great balls of clear, pure fire touched with emerald flames, some huge jelly or fish, or sargasso weed incrusted with noctiluca. Everywhere throughout the narrow zone of visibility were flickering constellations, suns and planets of momentary life, dying within the second in which they flashed into sight. Once Orion left a distinct memory on the retina—instantly to vanish forever. Perhaps to some unimaginably distant and unknown god, our world system may appear as fleeting. To my eyes it seemed as if I looked at the reflections of constellations which no longer swung across the heavens—shadows of shadows.

Then four bells struck—silveryly—and I knew that time still existed.

IV

THE POMEROON TRAIL

Ram Narine gave a party. It was already a thing of three months past, and it had been an extremely small party, and Ram Narine was only a very unimportant coolie on the plantation of the Golden Fleece. But, like many things small in themselves, this party had far-flung effects, and finally certain of these reached out and touched me. So far as I was concerned the party was a blessing. Because of it I was to travel the Pomeroon Trail. But it befell otherwise with Ram Narine.

It was, as I have said, a small party. Only two friends had been invited, and Ram and his companions had made very merry over a cooked cock-fowl and two bottles of rum. In the course of the night there was a fracas, and the face of one of Ram's friends had been somewhat disfigured, with a thick club and a bit of rock. He spent two months in the hospital, and eventually recovered. His injuries did not affect his speech, but, coolie-like, he would give little information as to his assailant.

And now the majesty of the law was about to inquire into this matter of Ram's party, and to sift to the uttermost the mystery which concerned the cooked cock-fowl and the rum, and the possibilities for evil which accrued to the sinister club and the bit of rock. I was invited to go, with my friends the Lawyer and the Judge, and our route lay from Georgetown westward, athwart two mighty Guiana rivers.

My mission to British Guiana was to find some suitable place to establish a Tropical Research Station, where three of us, a Wasp Man, an Embryo Man, and a Bird Man, all Americans, all enthusiastic, might learn at first-hand of the ways and lives of the wilderness creatures. After seven years of travel and bird-study in far distant countries, I had turned again to Guiana, the memory of whose jungles had never left me. In New York I had persuaded the powers of the Zoölogical Society that here lay a new, a worthy field of endeavor, hidden among the maze of water-trails, deep in the heart of the forests. For these were forests whose treasury of bird and beast and insect secrets had been only skimmed by collectors. The spoils had been carried to northern museums, where they were made available for human conversation and writing by the conferring of names by twentieth-century Adams. We had learned much besides from these specimens, and they had delighted the hearts of multitudes who would never have an opportunity to hear the evening cadence of the six-o'clock bee or the morning chorus of the howling monkeys.

But just as a single photograph reveals little of the inception, movement and dénouement of an entire moving-picture reel, so an isolated dead bird can present only the static condition of the plumage, molt, and dimensions at the instant before death. I am no nature sentimentalist, and in spite of moments of weakness, I will without hesitation shoot a bird as she sits upon her eggs, if I can thereby acquire desired information. But whenever possible, I prefer, for my own sake as well as hers, to prolong my observations, and thus acquire merit in the eyes of my fellow scientists and of Buddha.

I hoped the Pomeroon might prove such a desirable region, and fulfil my requirements to the extent that I might call it home for a season. So I accepted the invitation with a double pleasure, for I already knew what excellent company were friends Lawyer and Judge. As a site for my researches the Pomeroon failed; as an experience filled to the brim with interest and enjoyment, my visit left nothing to be desired.

Besides, I met Ram.

The big yellow kiskadees woke me at daybreak; my bedroom wren sang his heart out as I splashed in my shower; and before breakfast was over I heard the honking of my host's car. We glided over the rich red streets in the cool of early morning, past the thronged and already odoriferous market, and on to the tiny river ferry.

This was on Monday, but Ram Narine was to have yet another day of grace, by a twist in the nexus of circumstance which envelops all of us. The Lawyer's orderly had failed to notify his cabman that the Georgetown steamer left at six-fifty instead of seven. So when we finally left the stelling, with a host of twittering martins about us, it was with sorrowful faces. Not only were the master's wig and gown missing, besides other articles less necessary from a legal point of view, but the ham for luncheon was lacking. The higher law of compensation now became active, and the day of postponement gave me the sight of the Pomeroon Trail. This delay solved the matter of the wig and gown, and the ham was replaced by a curry equal to a Calcutta cook's best. This was served in the Colony House at Suddy Village, where one ate and slept in full enjoyment of the cool tradewind which blew in from the clear stretch of the Atlantic. And here one sat and read or listened to the droning of the witnesses in the petty cases held by the local magistrate in the courtroom below stairs.

I chose to do none of these things, but walked to the sandy beach and along it in the direction of the distant Spanish Main. It was a barren beach, judged by the salvage of most beaches; few shells, little seaweed, and the white sand alternating with stretches of brown mud. I walked until I came to a promontory and, amid splashing muddy waves, climbed out and perched where I ever love to be—on the outermost isolated pile of an old wharf. Scores of years must have passed since it was in use, and I tried to imagine what things had come and gone over it. Those were the days of the great Dutch sugar-plantations, when plantations were like small kingdoms, with crowds of slaves, and when the rich amber crystals resembled gold-dust in more than appearance. What bales of wondrous Dutch lace and furniture and goodies were unloaded from the old high-pooped sailing ships, and what frills and flounces fluttered in this same tradewind, what time the master's daughter set forth upon her first visit to the Netherlands! Now, a few rotted piles and rows of precise, flat Dutch bricks along the foreshore were all that was left of such memories. Inland, the wattled huts of the negroes had outlasted the great manor-houses.

Out at sea there was no change. The same muddy waves rose but never broke; the same tidal current swirled and eddied downstream. And now my mind became centered on passing débris, and in a few minutes I realized that, whatever changes had ruffled or passed over this coastal region of Guiana, the source of the muddy waters up country was as untouched now as when Amerigo Vespucci sailed along this coast four hundred and twenty years ago. I forgot the shore with its memories and its present lush growth and heat. For in the eddies of the wharf piles swirled strange things from the inland bush. First a patch of coarse grass, sailing out to sea, upright and slowly circling. On the stems I could distinguish unwilling travelers—crickets, spiders, and lesser wingless fry. Half-hollow logs drifted past, some deep and water-soaked, others floating high, with their upper parts quite dry. On such a one I saw a small green snake coiled as high as possible, and, serpent-like, waiting quietly for what fate should bring.

And now came an extraordinary sight—another serpent, a huge one, a great water-constrictor long dead, entangled in some brush, half caught firm and half dangling in the water. Attending were two vultures, ravenous and ready to risk anything for a meal. And they were risking a good deal, for each time they alighted, the brush and snake began to sink and allowed them time for only one or two frantic pecks before they were in water up to their bodies. They then had laboriously to take to flight, beating the water for the first few strokes. For several minutes one loop of the snake became entangled about a sunken pile, and now the scavengers boldly perched in the shallow water and fairly ducked their heads at each beakful. Next came a white ants' nest on a lichened trunk, with a multitude of the owners rushing frantically about, scores of them overrunning the confines of their small cosmos, to the great profit and delectation of a school of little fish which swam in the wake.

Most pitiful of all was a tiny opossum, with a single young one clinging tightly about her neck, which approached as I was about to leave. She was marooned on a hollow log which revolved in an arc while it drifted. As it turned, the little mother climbed, creeping first upward, then turning and clambering back, keeping thus ever on the summit. The tail of the baby was coiled about her mouth, and he was clinging with all his strength. It was a brave fight and well deserved success. No boat was in sight, so I could not hesitate, but, pulling off my shoes, I waded out as far as I could. At first I thought I must miss it, for I could not go in to my neck even for an opossum. But the wind helped; one or two heavy waves lapped conveniently against the sodden bark, and I succeeded in seizing the stub. As I reached for the little creature, the young opossum gave up and slipped into the water, and a ripple showed where a watchful fish had snapped it up. But I got hold of the mother's tail, and despite a weak hiss and a perfunctory showing of teeth, I lifted her and waded ashore. The last view I had, showed her crawling feebly but steadily along a branch into the heart of a dense thicket.

I climbed back to my outpost and dried my clothes in the sun, meditating on the curious psychology of a human which wanted opossums and would unhesitatingly sacrifice a score of opossums for a real scientific need, and yet would put itself to much discomfort to save a single one from going out to sea. Sentimental weakness is an inexplicable thing, and I finally made up my mind—as I always do—not to yield again to its promptings. In fact, I half turned to go in search of my specimen—and then didn't.

The tide had reached full ebb and the sun was low when I started back, and now I found a new beach many feet farther out and down. Still no shells, but a wonderful assortment of substitutes in the shape of a host of nuts and seeds—flotsam and jetsam from far up-river, like the snake and ants and opossum. There were spheres and kidney-shapes, half-circles and crescents, heads of little old men and pods like scimitars, and others like boomerangs. Some were dull, others polished and varnished. They were red and green, brown and pink and mauve, and a few gorgeous ones shaded from salmon into the most brilliant orange and yellow. Most were as lifeless in appearance as empty shells, but there were many with the tiny root and natal leaves sprouting hopefully through a chink. And just to be consistent, I chose one out of the many thousands piled in windrows and carried it high up on the shore, where I carefully planted it. It was a nut unknown to me at the time, but later I knew that I had started one of the greatest of the jungle trees on its way to success.

Ahead of me two boys dashed out of the underbrush and rushed into the waves. After swimming a few strokes they reached a great log and, heading it inward, swam it ashore and tied a rope to it. Here was a profession which appealed to me, and which indeed I had already entered upon, although the copper-skinned coolie boys did not recognize me as one of their guild. And small blame to them, for I was an idler who had labored and salvaged a perfectly good opossum and the scion of a mighty mora for naught. Here I was, no richer for my walk, and with only damp clothing to show for my pains. Yet we grinned cheerfully at each other as I went by, and they patted their log affectionately as they moored it fast.

Dusk was not far away when I reached Colony House and the Lawyer and I fared forth to seek a suit of pajamas. For the orderly had with him both luxuries and necessities, and so we went shopping. I may say at once that we failed completely in our quest, but, as is usually the case in the tropics, we were abundantly compensated.

We visited emporiums to the number of three,—all that the village could boast,—and the stare of the three Chinawomen was uniformly blank. They could be made in three days, or one could send to Georgetown for most excellent ones; we could not make clear the pressure of our need. The Lawyer grumbled, but the afterglow was too marvelous for anything to matter for long. Indeed, things—wonderful and strange, pathetic and amusing—were so numerous and so needful of all our faculties, that at one time my mind blurred like an over-talked telephone wire. My enthusiasm bubbled over and the good-natured Lawyer enjoyed them as I did.

Here were two among the many. There was the matter of the poor coolie woman who had injured a leg and who, misunderstanding some hastily given order, had left the hospital and was attempting to creep homeward, using hands and arms for crutches. Her husband was very small and very patient and he had not the strength to help her, although now and then he made an awkward attempt. While we sent for help, I asked questions, and in half-broken English I found that they lived six miles away. I had passed them early in the afternoon on the way to the beach, and in the intervening four hours they had progressed just about two hundred feet! This was patience with a vengeance, and worthy of compute. So, astronomer-like, I took notebook and pencil and began to estimate the time of their orbit. It was not an easy matter, for mathematics is to me the least of earth's mercies—and besides, I was not certain how many feet there were in a mile. By saying it over rapidly I at last convinced myself that it was "fivethousantwohunderaneighty."

I gasped when I finished, and repeated my questions. And again came the answers: "Yes, sahib, we go home. Yes, sahib, we live Aurora. Yes, sahib, we go like this ver' slow. No, sahib, have no food." And as he said the last sentence, a few drops of rain fell and he instantly spread his body-cloth out and held it over the sick woman. My mind instinctively went back to the mother opossum and her young. The coolie woman ceaselessly murmured in her native tongue and looked steadily ahead with patient eyes. Always she fumbled with her dusty fingers for a spot to grip and shuffle ahead a few inches.

Two hundred feet in four hours! And six full miles to the coolie quarters! This was on the fourteenth of a month. If my calculation was correct they would reach home on the tenth of the following month, in three weeks and five days. Truly oriental, if not, indeed, elemental patience! This planet-like journey was deviated from its path by a hospital stretcher and a swift return over the four-hour course, although this cosmic disturbance aroused comment from neither the man nor his wife. I checked off another helpless being salvaged from the stream of ignorance.

From serio-comic tragedy the village street led us to pure comedy. At the roadside we discovered a tiny white flag, and beneath it a bit of worn and grimy cloth stretched between a frame of wood. This was a poster announcing the impending performance of one "Profesor Rabintrapore," who, the painfully inked-in printing went on to relate, "craled from ankoffs" and "esskaped from cofens," and, besides, dealt with "spirits INvisibal." The professor's system of spelling would have warmed the heart of our modern schoolteachers, but his séances did not seem to be tempting many shekels from the pockets of coolie spiritualists.

After tea at the Colony House, I leaned out of my window and watched the moonlight gather power and slowly usurp the place of the sun. Then, like the succession of light, there followed sound: the last sleepy twitter came from the martin's nest under the eaves, and was sustained and deepened until it changed to the reverberating bass rumble of a great nocturnal frog.

In the moonlight the road lay white, though I knew in the warm sun it was a rich, foxy red. It vanished beyond some huts, and I wondered whither it went and remembered that tomorrow I should learn for certain. Then a ghostly goatsucker called eerily, "Who-are-you?" and the next sound for me was the summons to early coffee.

During the morning the missing orderly arrived, and with him the wig and gown and the ham. And now the matter of Ram Narine became pressing, and my friends Lawyer and Judge became less human and increasingly legal. I attended court and was accorded the honor of a chair between a bewigged official and the Inspector of Police, the latter resplendent in starched duck, gold lace, spiked helmet, and sword. Being a mere scientist and wholly ignorant of legal matters, I am quite like my fellow human beings and associate fear with my ignorance. So under the curious eyes of the black and Indian witnesses and other attendants, I had all the weaving little spinal thrills which one must experience on being, or being about to be, a criminal. There was I betwixt law and police, and quite ready to believe that I had committed something or other, with malicious or related intent.

But my thoughts were soon given another turn as a loud rapping summoned us to our feet at the entrance of the Judge. A few minutes before, we had been joking together and companionably messing our fingers with oranges upstairs. Now I gazed in awe at this impassive being in wig and scarlet vestments, whose mere entrance had brought us to our feet as if by religious or royal command. I shuddered at my memory of intimacies, and felt quite certain we could never again sit down at table as equals. When we had resumed our seats there was a stir at the opposite end of the courtroom, and a half-dozen gigantic black policemen entered, and with them a little, calm-faced, womanly man—Ram Narine, the wielder of the club and the rock. He ascended to the fenced-in prisoners' dock, looking, amid all his superstrong barriers to freedom, ridiculously small and inoffensive, like a very small puppy tethered with a cable. He gazed quietly down at the various ominous exhibits. A and B were the club and the rock, with their glued labels reminding one of museum specimens. Exhibit C was a rum-bottle—an empty one. Perhaps if it had been full, some flash of interest might have crossed Ram's face. Then weighty legal phrases and accusations passed, and the Judge's voice was raised, sonorous and impressive, and I felt that nothing but memory remained of that jovial personality which I had known so recently.

The proceeding which impressed me most was the uncanny skill of the official interpreter, who seemed almost to anticipate the words of the Judge or the Clerk. And, too, he gestured and shook his finger at the prisoner at the appropriate places, though he had his back fairly to the Judge and so could have had none but verbal clues. Ram Narine, it seems, was indicted on four counts, among which I could distinguish only that he was accused of maltreating his friend with intent to kill, and this in soft Hindustani tones he gently denied. Finally, that he had at least done the damage to his friend's face and very nearly killed him. To this he acquiesced, and the Court, as the Judge called himself, would now proceed to pass sentence. I was relieved to hear him thus re-name himself, for it seemed as if he too realized his changed personality.

And now the flow of legal reiteration and alliteration ceased for a moment, and I listened to the buzzing of a marabunta wasp and the warbling of a blue tanager among the fronds. For a moment, in the warm sunshine, the hot, woolly wigs and the starched coats and the shining scabbard seemed out of place. One felt all the discomfort of the tight boots and stiff collars, and a glance at Ram Narine showed his slim figure clothed in the looped, soft linen of his race. And he seemed the only wholly normal tropic thing there—he and the wasp and the tanager and the drooping motionless palm shading the window. In comparison, all else seemed almost Arctic, unacclimatized.

Then the deep tones of the Court rose, and in more simple verbiage,—almost crude and quite unlegal to my ears,—we heard Ram Narine sentenced to twelve months' hard labor. And the final words of the interpreter left Ram's face as unconcerned and emotionless as that of the Buddhas in the Burmese pagodas. And the simile recurred again and again after it was all over. So Ram and I parted, to meet again a few weeks later under strangely different conditions.

Robes and wigs and other legal properties were thrown aside, and once more we were all genial friends in the little automobile, with no trace of the terribly formal side of justice and right. The red Pomeroon road slipped past, and I, for one, wished for a dozen eyes and a score of memories to record the unrolling of that road. It was baffling in its interest.

The first ten or twenty miles consisted of huge sugar estates, recently awakened to feverish activity by the war prices of this commodity. Golden Fleece, Taymouth Manor, Capoey, Move Success, Anna Regina, Hampton Court—all old names long famous in the history of the colony. In many other districts the Dutch have left not only a heritage of names, such as Vreeden-Hoop and Kyk-over-al, but the memory of a grim sense of humor, as in the case of three estates lying one beyond the other, which the owners named in turn, Trouble, More Trouble, and Most Trouble. Unlike our southern plantations, the workers' quarters are along the road, with the big house of the manager well back, often quite concealed. The coolies usually live in long, communal, barrack-like structures, the negroes in half-open huts.

This first part of the Pomeroon road was one long ribbon of variegated color: Hundreds of tiny huts, with picturesque groups of coolies and negroes and a smaller number of Chinese, all the huts dilapidated, some leaning over, others so perforated that they looked like the ruins of European farmhouses after being shelled. Patched, propped up, tied together, it was difficult to believe that they were habitable. All were embowered in masses of color and shadowed by the graceful curves of cocoanut palms and bananas. The sheets of bougainvillea blossoms, of yellow allamandas, and the white frangipani temple flowers of the East, brought joy to the eye and the nostril; the scarlet lilies growing rank as weeds—all these emphasized the ruinous character of the huts. Along the front ran a trench, doubling all the glorious color in reflection, except where it was filled with lotus blossoms and Victoria regia.

As we passed swiftly, the natives rushed out on the shaky board-and-log bridges, staring in wonder, the women with babies astride of their hips, the copper-skinned children now and then tumbling into the water in their excitement. The yellows and reds and greens of the coolies added another color-note. Everything seemed a riot of brilliant pigment. Against the blue sky great orange-headed vultures balanced and volplaned; yellow-gold kiskadees shrieked blatantly, and, silhouetted against the green fronds, smote both eye and ear.

We were among the first to pass the road in an automobile. Awkward, big-wheeled carts, drawn by the tiniest of burros and heaped high with wood, were the only other vehicles. For the rest, the road was a Noah's Ark, studded with all the domestic animals of the world: pigs, calves, horses, burros, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and hordes of gaunt, pariah curs. Drive as carefully as we might, we left behind a succession of defunct dogs and fowls. For the other species, especially those of respectable size, we slowed down, more for our sake than theirs. Calves were the least intelligent, and would run ahead of us, gazing fearfully back, first over one, then the other shoulder, until from fatigue they leaped into the wayside ditch. The natives themselves barely moved aside, and why we did not topple over more of the great head-carried loads I do not know. We left behind us a world of scared coolies and gaping children.

The road was excellent, but it twisted and turned bewilderingly. It was always the same rich red hue—made of earth-clinker burned under sods. Preparing this seemed a frequent occupation of the natives, and the wood piles on the carts melted away in the charcoal-like fires of these subterranean furnaces. Here and there tiny red flags fluttered from tall bamboo poles, reminiscent of the evil-spirit flags in India and Burma. But with the transportation across the sea of these oriental customs certain improvements had entered in,—adaptations to the gods of ill of this new world. So the huts in course of alteration, and the new ones being erected, were guarded, not only by the fluttering and the color, but by a weird little figure of a dragon demon himself drawn on the cloth, a quite unoriental visualizing of the dreaded one.

As we flew along, we gradually left the villages of huts behind. Single thatched houses were separated by expanses of rice-fields, green rectangles framed in sepia mud walls, picked out here and there by intensely white and intensely Japanesque egrets. Great black muscovy ducks spattered up from amber pools, and tri-colored herons stood like detached shadows of birds, mere cardboard figures, so attenuated that they appeared to exist in only two planes of space.

The rice-fields gave place to pastures and these to marshes; thin lines of grass trisected the red road—the first hint of the passing of the road and the coming of the trail. Rough places became more frequent. Then came shrub, and an occasional branch whipped our faces. Black cuckoos or old witch-birds flew up like disheveled grackles; cotton-birds flashed by, and black-throated orioles glowed among the foliage. Carrion crows and laughing falcons watched us from nearby perches, and our chauffeur went into second gear.

Now and then some strange human being passed,—man or woman, we could hardly tell which,—clad in rags which flapped in the breeze, long hair waving, leaning unsteadily on a staff, like a perambulating scarecrow. The eyes, fixed ahead, were fastened on things other than those of this world, so detached that their first sight of an automobile aroused them not at all. The gulf between the thoughts of these creatures and the world today was too deep to be bridged by any transient curiosity or fear. They trudged onward without a glance, and we steered aside to let them pass.

The grass between the ruts now brushed the body of the car; even the wild people passed no more, and the huts vanished utterly. Forest palms appeared, then taller brush, and trees in the distance. Finally, the last three miles became a scar through the heart of the primeval jungle, open under the lofty sky of foliage, the great buttresses of the trunks exposed for the first time to the full glare of day. The trail was raw with all the snags and concealed roots with which the jungle likes to block entrance to its privacy; and, rocking and pitching like a ship in the waves, we drew up to a woodpile directly in our path. Standing up in our seats, we could see, just beyond it, the dark flood of the Pomeroon surging slowly down to the sea. Seven years ago I had passed this way en route from Morawhanna, paddled by six Indians. Maintenant ce n'est qu'une mémoire.

For centuries the woodskins of the Indians had passed up and down and left no trace. Only by this tidal road could one reach the mouth of tributaries. And now the sacred isolation of this great tropical river was forever gone. The tiny scar along which we had bumped marked the permanent coming of man. And his grip would never relax. Already capillaries were spreading through the wilderness tissues. Across the river from our woodpile were two tiny Portuguese houses—those petty pioneers of today whose forefathers were worldwide explorers. Around us, scarcely separable from the bush, was the coffee plantation of one Señor Serrao. He and his mother greeted us, and with beaming courtesy we were led to their wattled hut, where a timid sister gave us grapefruit. I talked with him of his work and of the passing of the animals of the surrounding forest. Tapir were still common, and the wild pigs and deer waged war on his vegetables. Then a swirl drew our eyes to the brown flood and he said, "Perai."

And this was the end of the tropical trail which had started out as a road, with its beginning, for me, in the matter of Ram Narine. Along its route we had passed civilization as men know it here, and had seen it gradually fray out into single aged outcasts, brooding on thoughts rooted and hidden in the mystery of the Far East. From the water and the jungle the trail had vouchsafed us glimpses and whispers of the wild creatures of this great continent, of the web of whose lives we hoped to unravel a few strands. The end of the trail was barred with the closed toll-gate of memory.

V

A HUNT FOR HOATZINS

Lines of gray, plunging tropic rain slanted across the whole world. Outward-curving waves of red mud lost themselves in the steady downpour beyond the guards on the motor-car of the Inspector of Police. It is surprising to think how many times and in what a multitude of places I have been indebted to inspectors of police. In New York the average visitor would never think of meeting that official except under extraordinary and perhaps compromising circumstances; but in tropical British possessions the head of the police combines with his requisite large quantity of gold lace and tact a delightful way of placing visitors, and especially those of serious scientific intent, under considerable obligation. So my present Inspector of Police, at an official banquet the preceding evening, had insisted that I travel along the seafront of Guiana—betwixt muddy salt water and cane-fields—in his car. But an inspector of police is not necessarily a weather prophet, and now the close-drawn curtains forbade any view, so it was decided that I tranship to the single daily train.

Three times I had to pass the ticket-collector at the station to see after my luggage, and three times a large clover-leaf was punched out of my exceedingly small bit of pasteboard. A can of formaline still eluded me, but I looked dubiously at my limp trey of clubs. Like a soggy gingersnap, it drooped with its own weight, and the chances seemed about even whether another trip past the hopelessly conscientious coolie gate-man would find me with a totally dismembered ticket or an asymmetrical four of clubs of lace-like consistency. I forebore, and walking to the end of the platform, looked out at a long line of feathery cocoanut palms, pasteled by the intervening rain. They were silhouetted in a station aperture of corrugated iron, of all building materials the most hideous; but the aperture was of that most graceful of all shapes, a Moorish arch.

Neither my color nor my caste, in this ultra-democratic country, forced me to travel first-class, but that necessary, unwritten distinction, felt so keenly wherever there is a mingling of race, compelled me to step into a deserted car upholstered in soiled dusty blue. I regretted that I must "save my face," as a Chinaman would say, and not sit on the greasy bare boards of the second-class coach, where fascinating coolie persons sat, squatting on the seats with their heads mixed up with their knees. Desire, prompted by interest and curiosity, drew me to them, and frequently I got up and walked past, listening to the subdued clink of silver bracelets and anklets, and sniffing the wisps of ghee and curry and hemp which drifted out. Nose-rings flashed, and in the dim station light I caught faint gleams of pastel scarves—sea-green and rose. I longed for Kim's disguise, but I knew that before many stations were passed the concentration of mingled odors would have driven me back to my solitude. Perhaps the chief joy of it all lay in the vignettes of memory which it aroused: that unbelievable hot midnight at Agra; the glimpse of sheer Paradise in a sunrise on the slopes of Kinchinjunga; the odors of a caravan headed for the Khyber Pass.

When I returned to my coach I found I was to have company. A stout—no, exceedingly fat—bespectacled gentleman, with pigment of ebony, and arrayed in full evening dress and high hat, was guarding a small dilapidated suitcase, and glaring at him across the aisle was a man of chocolate hue, with the straight black hair of the East Indian and the high cheekbones and slanting eyes of the Mongolian. His dress was a black suit of heavy Scotch plaid, waistcoat and all, with diamonds and loud tie, and a monocle which he did not attempt to use. Far off in the distant corner lounged a bronzed planter in comfortable muddy clothes. But we three upheld the prestige of the west end of the carriage.

Soon, impelled by the great heat, I removed my coat and was looked at askance; but I was the only comfortable one of the three. With the planter I should have liked to converse, but with those who sat near I held no communication. I could think of them only as insincere imitators of customs wholly unadapted to their present lives and country. I could have respected them so much more if they had clad themselves in cool white duck. I hold that a man is not worth knowing who will endure excessive tropical heat, perspiring at every pore, because his pride demands a waistcoat and coat of thickest woolen material, which would have been comfortable in a blizzard. So I went out again to look at the coolies with their honest garb of draped linen, and they seemed more sincere and worthy of acquaintance.

We started at last, and only a few miles of glistening rails had passed beneath us when, finally, proof of the complete schism between police and weather bureaus became evident: the fresh tradewind dispersed the rain! The clouds remained, however—low, swirling masses of ashy-blue, billowing out like smoke from a bursting shell, or fraying in pale gray tatters, tangling the fronds of lofty palms. For the rest of the day the light came from the horizon—a thrillingly weird, indirect illumination, which lent vividness and intensity to every view. The world was scoured clean, the air cleansed of every particle of dust, while the clouds lent a cool freshness wholly untropical, and hour after hour the splendid savannah lands of the coast of Guiana slipped past, as we rumbled swiftly southward along the entire shore-front.

At first we passed close to the sea, and this was the most exciting part of the trip. In places the dikes had given way and the turbulent muddy waters had swept inland over rice and cane-fields, submerging in one implacable tide the labor of years. A new dike, of mud and timbers and sweet-smelling hurdles of black sage, had been erected at the roadside, and past this went all traffic. Now and then an automobile had to slow up until a great wave broke, and then dash at full speed across the danger-spot. In spite of the swiftness, the wind-flung spray of the next wave would drench the occupants. The lowering sea-water glistened among the sickly plants, and strange fish troubled the salty pools as they sought uneasily for an outlet to the ocean. A flock of skimmers looked wholly out of place driving past a clump of bamboos.

Then the roadbed shifted inland, and lines of patient, humped zebus trailed slowly from their sheds—sheds of larger size and better built than the huts of their owners. These open-work homes were picturesque and unobtrusive; they fitted into the landscape as if, like the palms, they had come into being through years of quiet assimilation of water and warmth. Their walls were of mud, adobe, mere casual upliftings of the sticky soil which glistened in every direction. Their roofs were of trooly-palm fronds, brown and withered, as though they had dropped from invisible trees high overhead. Like the coolies themselves, the houses offered no note of discord.

I had just come from the deep jungle of the interior with its varying lights and shadows, its myriad color-grades, pastel, neutral in quality. Here was boldness of stroke, sharpness of outline, strength of pigment. All the dominant tones of this newly washed coastal region were distinct and incisive. Clear-cut silhouettes of vultures and black witch-birds were hunched on fence-posts and shrubs. Egrets, like manikins cut from the whitest of celluloid, shone as far as the eye could see them. As if the rain had dissolved and washed away every mixed shade and hue, the eye registered only flaming, clashing colors; great flocks of birds black as night, save for a glowing scarlet gorget; other black birds with heads of shining gold, flashing as the filigree nose-beads flash against the rich dark skin of the coolies.

Like the colors, the sounds were individualized by sharpness of tone, incisiveness of utterance. The violent cries of flycatchers cleft the air, and, swiftly as we passed, struck on my ear fair and strong. The notes of the blackbirds were harmonious shafts of sound, cleaving the air like the whistle of the meadowlark. Hawks with plumage of bright cinnamon and cream, hurled crisp, piercing shrieks at the train. Only the vultures, strung like ebony beads along the fronds of the cocoanut palms, spread their wings to dry, and dumbly craned their necks down as we passed.

Past Mahaica and Abary we rushed, the world about us a sliding carpet of all the emerald tints in the universe. And just as the last tint had been used up and I knew there must be some repetition, the clouds split and a ray of pure sunlight shot through the clear air and lit up a field of growing rice with living green of a still newer hue, an unearthly concentrated essence of emerald which was comparable to nothing but sprouting rice in rain-washed sunlight. Whether this be on the hot coastlands of Java, in tiny sod-banked terraces far up on the slopes of Dehra Dun, or in the shadow of Fuji itself, makes no manner of difference. The miracle of color never fails.

Trees were so rare that one was compelled to take notice of them. High above the bamboos, high above even those arboreal towers of Pisa, the cocoanut palms, rose the majestic silk-cotton trees, bare of leaves at this season, with great branches shooting out at breathless heights. Like strange gourd-like fruit, three sizes of nests hung pendant from these lofty boughs: short, scattered purses of yellow orioles, colonied clusters of the long pouches of yellow-backed bunyahs, and, finally, the great, graceful, woven trumpets of the giant black caciques, rarely beautiful, and, like the trees, scarce enough to catch and hold the eye. The groves of cocoanut palms, like a hundred enormous green rockets ever bursting in mid-air, checkered the sunlight, which sifted through and was made rosy by a host of lotus blooms beneath. Then the scene changed in a few yards, and low, untropical shrubs filled the background, while at our feet rose rank upon rank of cat-tails, and we might be passing across the Jersey meadows.

Each little station was the focus of a world of its own. Coolies and blacks excitedly hustled to place on board their contribution to the world's commerce:—tomatoes no larger than cherries, in beautifully woven baskets; a crate of chickens or young turkeys; a live sheep protesting and entangled in the spokes of an old-fashioned bicycle; a box of fish, flashing silver and old rose. Some had only a single bundle of fodder to offer. At one station, quaintly named De Kinderen, a clear-faced coolie boy pushed a small bunch of plantains into the freight van, then sat on the steps. As the train started to move he settled himself as if for a long ride, and for a second or two closed his eyes. Then he opened them, climbed down, and swung off into the last bit of clearing. His face was sober, not a-smile at a thoughtless lark. I looked at his little back as he trudged toward his home, and wondered what desire for travel, for a glimpse of the world, was back of it all. And I wished that I could have asked him about it and taken him with me. This little narrow-gauge link with the outside world perhaps scatters heartaches as well as shekels along its right of way.

I was watching a flock of giant anis, which bubbled cheerfully on their slow flight across the fields, when a wide expanse of water blocked our way, and we drew up at the bank of the Berbice River.

In the course of five days at New Amsterdam we achieved our object. We found hoatzins, their nests, eggs, and young, and perpetuated in photographs their wonderful habits handed down through all the ages past, from the time when reptiles were the dominant beings, and birds and mammals crept about, understudying their rôle to come, as yet uncertain of themselves and their heritage. When we needed it the sun broke through the rain and shone brightly; when our lenses were ready, the baby hoatzins ran the gamut of their achievements. They crept on all fours, they climbed with fingers and toes, they dived headlong, and swam as skilfully as any Hesperornis of old. This was, and I think always will be, to me, the most wonderful sight in the world. To see a tiny living bird duplicate within a few minutes the processes which, evolved slowly through uncounted years, have at last culminated in the world of birds as we find it today—this is impressive beyond words. No poem, no picture, no terrible danger, no sight of men killed or injured has ever affected me as profoundly as this.

Thus the primary object of the trip was accomplished. But that is a poor expedition indeed which does not yield another hundred per cent. in oblique values, of things seen out of the corner of one's eyes.

If one is an official or an accredited visitor to Berbice, the Colony House is placed at one's service. I am sure that it is quite the ugliest of all colony houses, and surrounded by what I am equally sure is one of the most beautiful of tropical gardens. If Berbice held no other attraction it would be worth visiting to see this garden. The first floor of Colony House is offices, the second is the Supreme Court, and when I peeped in I saw there were three occupants—a great yellow cat curled up in the judge's chair, and two huge toads solemnly regarding each other from the witness-box and the aisle.

Three stories in Guiana constitute a skyscraper, and that night I slept on a level with the palm fronds. It was a house of a thousand sounds. During the day hosts of carpenters tore off uncountable shingles devastated by white ants. Two antithetical black maids attended noisily but skilfully to all my wants. At night, cats and frogs divided the vocal watches, and a patient dog never tired of rolling the garbage-can downstairs past the Supreme Court to the first floor. I thought of this at first as some strange canine rite, a thing which Alice could have explained with ease, or which to Seumas and to Slith would have appeared reasonable and fitting. I used to wait for it before I went to sleep, knowing that comparative silence would follow. I discovered later that this intelligent dog had learned that, by nudging the can off the top step, the cover would become dislodged at about the level of the Supreme Court, and from there to the government offices he could spend a night of gastronomic joy, gradually descending to the level of the entrance.

A kind planter put me up at the club, the usual colonial institution where one may play bridge or billiards, drink swizzles, or read war telegrams "delayed in transit." These were the usual things to do, daily duties, timed almost regularly by the kiskadees' frantic farewell to the day or the dodging of the first vampire among the electric-light bulbs. But in this exciting country, with hoatzins asleep within a half-mile, I could not bring my mind to any of these things, and wandered about, idly turning the leaves of dull periodicals, looking at cases of cues and the unfinished records of past billiard tournaments, yellowed with age. The steward approached timidly.

"Would the sahib like to see the library?"

Yes, the sahib decidedly would. We climbed the stairs, creaking as if they complained at the unaccustomed weight of footsteps, to the upper room of the club. It was large, barn-like in its vacantness, with a few little tables, each surrounded by a group of chairs, like chickens crowded about a hen. The walls were lined with books and there was an atmosphere about the room which took hold of me at once. I could not identify it with any previous experience, certainly not with the libraries of Georgetown in which I had spent days. This was something subtle, something which had to discover itself. The steward led me proudly about, making it plain that his affection was here rather than with the mixing of swizzles below. No, he had never read any of them, but he would feel honored if I found any pleasure in them and would condescend to borrow one. He seemed rather emphatic on this point; he especially desired that I take one to Colony House. Then he left me.

The books were without a speck of dust, each volume in its place and aligned with precision. Little by little, as I made my round, nibbling at a book here and there, the secret of the place came to me: it was a library of the past, a dead library. There seemed something uncanny, something unreal about it. Here were hundreds of books, there tables and chairs, but no one ever used them. Yet it was in the center of a large town just above the most frequented gathering-place. More than this the library itself was obsolete. No volume had been added for many years. Most of them were old, old tomes, richly bound in leather and tree calf. Nearly all were strange to me—little-known histories and charmingly naïve "Conversations" and memoirs of generations ago. They were delicately, gracefully worded, many of them; one could feel the lace and velvet of the sleeve which had touched them; the subtle musty odors of the yellowed page and crumbling leather seemed tinged with faint, strange perfumes. It was astounding and very affecting, and my interest increased with every minute.

The evening chorus of the tropical night had commenced outside, and a glance out of the window showed a network of motionless fronds dimly outlined against the rose-colored clouds over the waters of the Berbice. Below I heard the soft click of billiard balls. Then I returned to the books. Their rich bindings were falling apart, musty, worm-eaten, many held together only by a string. It was as if I had entered the richly filled library of some old manor-house which had been sealed up for two-score years, and yet kept lovingly dusted. It was this sense of constant care which served to emphasize the weird isolation, the uncanny desolation.

I glanced at Lives of the Lindsays, by Lord Lindsay, a work of sixty-five years ago, unknown to me, quaint and delightful. This rubbed covers with Lockhart's Life of Scott. On another shelf I recall The Colloquies of Edward Osborne, Citizen and Clothmaker of London, which held me until I knew that the Colony House dog would get all of my dinner if I did not start homewards. The next volume to this was a friend, Thier's The Consulate and the Empire. Then I walked past stacks of old-fashioned novels, nearly all in three volumes. Their names were strange, and I suppose they would prove deadly reading to our generation; but I am sure that in their day they fascinated many eyes reading by the flickering light of tapers and rushes. And even now they stood bravely alongside Dickens and Scott.

Finally I reached up to the highest row and chose one of a series of heavy tomes whose titles had completely fallen away with age and climate. I untied the binding string, opened at random and read thus:—

"It is vain, then, any longer to insist on variations of organic structure being the result of habits or circumstances. Nothing has been elongated, shortened or modified, either by external causes or internal volition; all that has been changed has been changed suddenly, and has left nothing but wrecks behind it, to advertise us of its former existence."

Thus wrote the Baron Cuvier many years ago. And this brought me back to reality, and my study of those living fossils now asleep in the neighboring bunduri thorn bushes, whose nestlings so completely refute the good baron's thesis.

As I reached the door I selected a volume at random to take back to Colony House. I put out the lights and turned a moment to look about. The platinum wires still glowed dully, and weak moonlight now filled the room with a silver grayness. I wondered whether, in the magic of some of these tropical nights, when the last ball had been pocketed and the last swizzle drunk belowstairs, some of the book-lovers of olden times, who had read these volumes and turned down the creased pages, did not return and again laugh and cry over them. There was no inharmonious note: no thrilling short stories, no gaudy chromatic bindings, no slangy terse titles, no magazines or newspapers. Such gentlefolk as came could have sat there and listened to the crickets and the occasional cry of a distant heron and have been untroubled by the consciousness of any passage of time.

I learned that this Library Club had been the oldest in the West Indies, founded about three quarters of a century ago. It had long ceased to exist, and no one ever disturbed the quietness of the gradual dissolution of this admirable collection of old works. I walked slowly back, thinking of the strange contrast between what I had seen and the unlovely, commercialized buildings along the street. I was startled from my reverie by the challenge of the sentry, and for a moment could not think what to answer. I had well-nigh forgotten my own personality in the vividness of the stately early Victorian atmosphere.

Long after the Colony House dog had noisily announced the beginning of his nocturnal feast, I lay behind my net poring over the Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as related by herself in conversations with her physician, comprising her opinions and anecdotes of some most remarkable persons, and I came to the conclusion that by far the most remarkable of them all was Lady Hester herself.

Berbice, we were told by residents elsewhere, was behind the times. I found it up to date, colonially speaking, and, indeed, possessing certain ideas and ideals which might advantageously be dispersed throughout the colony. But New Amsterdam, with all its commercial hardness of outline and sordid back streets, flashed out in strangely atavistic touches now and then; a sort of quintessence of out-of-dateness which no inhabitant suspected, and which was incapable of legislative change. First, there were hoatzins, hinting of æons of years ago; then, the library, which preserved so perfectly the atmosphere of our great grandparents. And now, as I left the compound of Colony House in the early morning, I watched with fascination a coolie woman bearing a great bundle of loosely bound fagots on her head. As she walked, they kept dropping out, and instead of leaning down or squatting and so endangering the equilibrium of all the rest, she simply shifted her weight to one foot, and felt about with the other. When it encountered the fallen stick, the big toe uncannily separated and curled about it, and she instantly bent her knee, passed up the stick to her hand and thence to the bundle again. It surpassed anything I had ever seen among savages—the hand-like mobility of that coolie woman's toes. And I thought that, if she was a woman of Simla or of the Western Ghats, then my belief in the Siwalik origin of mankind was irrevocable!

It seemed as if I could not escape from the spell of the past. I walked down to a dilapidated stelling to photograph a mob of vultures, and there found a small circle of fisherfolk cleaning their catch. They were wild-looking negroes and coolies, half-naked, and grunting with the exertion of their work. A glance at the fish again drove me from Berbice into ages long gone by. Armored catfish they were, reminiscent of the piscine glories of Devonian times—uncouth creatures, with outrageously long feelers and tentacles, misplaced fins, and mostly ensconced in bony armor, sculptured and embossed with designs in low relief. I watched with half-closed eyes the fretted shadows of the palms playing over the glistening black bodies of the men, and the spell of the strange fish seemed to shift the whole scene centuries, tens of centuries, backward.

The fish, attractive in the thought suggested by their ancient armor, were quite unlovely in their present surroundings. Piles of them were lying about in the hot sun, under a humming mass of flies, awaiting their unhurried transit to the general market. When the fishermen had collected a quantity of heads, apparently the chief portions considered inedible, these were scraped off the stelling to the mud beneath. At this there arose a monstrous hissing and a whistle of wings, and a cloud of black vultures descended with a rush and roar from surrounding roofs and trees.

While watching and photographing them, I saw an antithesis of bird-life such as I had never imagined. The score of vultures fought and tore and slid about in the black noisome mud exposed by the low tide. Sometimes they were almost back downward—fairly slithering through the muck to seize some shred of fish, hissing venomously; and at last spreading filthy, mud-dripping pinions to flap heavily away a few paces. In disgust at the sight and sound and odor, I started to turn back, when in the air just above the fighting mass, within reach of the flying mud, poised a hummingbird, clean and fresh as a rain-washed blossom. With cap of gold and gorget of copper, this smallest, most ethereal, and daintiest of birds hung balanced just above the most offensive of avian sights. My day threatened to be one of emotion instead of science.

Berbice vouchsafed one more surprise, a memory from the past which appeared and vanished in an instant. One of the most delightful of men was taking me out to where the hoatzins lived. We went in his car, which, and I use his own simile, was as truly a relic as anything I have mentioned. I have been in one-horse shays. I have ridden for miles in a Calcutta gharry. I was now in a one-cylinder knockabout which in every way lived up to its name. It was only after a considerable time that I felt assured that the mud-guards and wheels were not on the point of leaving us. When I had also become accustomed to the clatter and bang of loose machinery I was once more able to look around. I had become fairly familiar with the various racial types of Guiana, and with some accuracy I could distinguish the more apparent strains. Halfway through the town we passed three girls, one a coolie, the second dominantly negroid, while the third showed the delicate profile, the subtle color, the unmistakable physiognomy of a Syrian. She might have posed for the finest of the sculptures on a Babylonian wall. I turned in astonishment to my host, who explained that years ago some Syrian peddlers had come this way, remained, prospered, and sent for their wives. Now their children had affiliated with the other varied types—affiliated in language and ideas perhaps, but not, in one case at least, at the expense of purity of facial lineament of race.

As I have said, success with the hoatzins came swiftly and completely. We had discovered a few nests with young birds of just the right age and in positions which left nothing to be desired. Yet when a jovial Scotch manager came with news that one of his coolies knew of colonies of hundreds of breeding anaquas, we decided to take the whole of the proverbial cake instead of being satisfied with our generous slice. So we made all preparations and left Colony House early one morning.

To be equal to the occasion we went in full force, with two servants, an Indian and a black, and an automobile full of duffle, guns, nets to catch the young birds, glasses, notebooks, game-bags, and ropes. As usual it poured in torrents at daybreak but cleared somewhat as we started. A reckless Creole driver hurled our tiny Ford through deep puddles and around corners, and we rocked and skidded and splashed, and were forever just grazing coolies and their carts.

A land of a thousand surprises! We stopped a moment at the lunatic asylum to borrow an ax, and it was presently brought to us by a smiling, kindly old coolie inmate, who kept murmuring Hindustani to himself. As we drove on, a gigantic black man appeared on the ridgepole of the highest building and, stark naked, rushed aimlessly back and forth, stamping gleefully on the corrugated iron, and chanting as he stamped. We gazed on the axe and for once did not chide the driver in his reckless progress.

With relief we reached the bridge, where our Scotch friend had kindly provided mule, rope, boat, and coolies. We waited for a while, but as the downpour showed no signs of abating, we started on one of the wildest, weirdest journeys I have ever taken. The trench was narrow and deep, the boat was overladen, the banks were erratic, the mule was fractious, and the coolies were extremely unskilful. For the first half-mile the trench was crowded with great dreadnaughts of iron cane-boats, wholly irresponsible in position and movements. In places our speed caused a troubling of the water far ahead, and this now and again swung a cane-barge directly across our path. Again and again the stern of our boat would develop a sentient mind of its own and swirl ahead. Then followed a chorus of yells at the mule-boy, and a nervous half-rising in the boat, and a still more terrible silence, broken at last by a crash—hollow and echoing if we struck a cane-barge, splintering if against a log or stump. The boat would tip, several gallons of water pour in, and then there became audible our minute and detailed opinions of coolies and mules in general and ours in particular.

Of course every one who came between our mule and the bank had to flee, or else was scraped into the trench by the rope; and we left in our wake knots of discomfited coolie women who had been washing themselves or their clothes and who had to escape at the last moment. Calves were a source of intense excitement, and their gambols and intricate manipulations of our rope would have been highly amusing if the result of each encounter had not been mixed up so acutely with our own fate. I sat crouched down, a water-soaked mound of misery. Miserable, for I was still partly dry, having on the only raincoat, for the purpose of protecting our precious camera. Water ran up hill that morning, seeking out crevices and buttonholes by which to penetrate to my person and to the leather-covered box which was so precious.

Things went better after we made the discovery that we were progressing bow-hindmost. And all the time the rain poured down, and coolie women and girls plodded drearily by to work. We landed finally and, in despair of photography, I cached the camera beneath a slanting tree. Then we began a tramp through all the mud in the world. There is only one place where the mud is deeper and more sticky than by a sugar-plantation trench, and that is on the dividing dikes of a Chinese rice-field. We slipped and slid, and when our shoes became too heavy to lift, we dabbled them in the trench and washed them. In brief intervals of less heavy rain we watched passing herons and hawks, while giant anis bubbled and grunted in surprise at our procession.

At last the never-to-be-forgotten hoarse gutturals of hoatzins came to our ears, and dimly through the rain we saw one small branchful of four birds, hunched up with drenched plumage. Two others were posed as rain-worshipers—rufous wings widespread, heads stretched out, welcoming the sheets of water which poured over them. Their wild crests, though sodden and glued together, were still erect, dripping and swaying. We encircled the clump of trees and found deep canals and trenches on all sides. We shot one bird, which, true to its reptilian nature, spread both wings, locked its flight feathers among the twists of a liana tangle, and there hung suspended out of reach.

A strange coolie now appeared out of the mist and promised many, many, many anaquas "not too far" beyond. We shook the wet from our hat-brims, squeezed it from our shoes, and plodded on. The cane-fields seemed never-ending, always separated by lily-covered trenches. Then came half-swampy expanses with scattered trees. Careful search revealed another half-dozen hoatzins, sheltered among the dense foliage of the tallest tree. No nests were visible, and the rain was so heavy that we could not look upward. In the midst of the vague expanse of this dreary world a rootie spine-tail perched in a tree and sang three notes. We shot him because we could think of no other way at that moment of relieving our feelings. Then we had a reaction, almost hysterical, and the coolies murmured, "Padliadme" (madmen), and we laughed loudly again and again and started homeward. We chaffed the coolies until they were embarrassed; we slid into the deepest holes we could find. We made set speeches on the dampness of sugar-plantations, on tropical weather, and especially on the veracity of the indentured inhabitants of India. It was all as good-natured as it sounded, for, after all, had we not already found the birds themselves and obtained our notes and photographs?

Then we discussed the psychology of rain and of getting wet, and I arrived at the following conclusions, which are true ones. Once drenched to the skin in the tropics, all discomfort is gone. One simply squidges around in the blissful knowledge that all the mud and water in the world can now arouse no feeling of discomfort. One has simply been translated to a new world of elements, a new cosmos of sensation. And as with most such transmigrations, it is only the shifting which is disagreeable. As long as a shred of clothing is dry, we think of it and worry about it, and endeavor to keep it dry, and shrink from the clammy touch of partly sodden foot-wear. Once we slip into a trench, the rain becomes only a pleasant tapping on one's shoulders, a rhythmical, liquid vibration. With all fear eliminated, water and mud become no more unpleasant than air and earth. So our plantation expedition, like Gaul, may be divided into three parts: first, a thrilling, dangerous, expectant phase; a brief second period of thoroughly disappointing revelation; third, a jolly, unscientific, and wholly hilarious finale. These are the trips which no explorer or traveler mentions, because there are no tangible returns. But it is seldom that any expedition, however barren of direct results, cannot be made to yield some viewpoint of interest.

* * * * *

The sun had just risen when the little ferryboat left the stelling on its way to the railway station on the opposite bank of the river. Half of the jungle across the Berbice was dark, dark green, almost black, with a fragment of rainbow hung obliquely above it, tangled in blue-black clouds. A little way up-river the level sun's rays struck fairly, and the rounded, cloud-like billows of foliage were of palest sage-green. Our shore was all one blatant glare, flooded already with the violent light of a tropical day. Against the black Berbice cloud a hundred fork-tailed flycatchers flashed and vanished alternately as they swerved and careened. Steadily across its threatening face was drawn a single line of scarlet—a score of ibises glowing like the essence of rubies.

VI

HOATZINS AT HOME

The flight of the hoatzin resembles that of an over-fed hen. The hoatzin's voice is no more melodious than the cry of a peacock, and less sonorous than an alligator's roar. The bird's grace is batrachian rather than avian, while the odor of its body resembles that of no bird untouched by dissolution. Still, zoölogically considered, the hoatzin is probably the most remarkable and interesting bird living on the earth today.

It has successfully defied time and space. For it, the dial of the ages has moved more slowly than for the rest of organic life, and although living and breathing with us today, yet its world is an affair of two dimensions—a line of thorny saplings threaded along the muddy banks of a few tropical waters.

A bird in a cage cannot escape, and may be found month after month wherever the cage is placed. A stuffed bird in a case may resist disintegration for a century. But when we go to look for the bluebirds which nest in the orchard, they may have flown a half mile away in their search for food. The plover which scurries before us today on the beach may tonight be far away on the first lap of his seven thousand mile flight to the southward.

The hoatzin's status lies rather with the caged bird. In November in New York City an Englishman from British Guiana said to me, "Go to the Berbice River, and at the north end of the town of New Amsterdam, in front of Mr. Beckett's house, you will find hoatzins." Six months later as I drove along a tropical river road I saw three hoatzins perched on a low thorn bush at the river's edge in front of a house. And the river was the Berbice, and the house that of Mr. Beckett.

Thus are the hoatzins independent of space, as all other flying birds know it, and in their classic reptilian affinities,—voice, actions, arms, fingers, habits,—they bring close the dim epochs of past time, and renew for our inspection the youth of bird-life on the earth. It is discouraging ever to attempt to translate habits fraught with so profound a significance into words, or to make them realistic even with the aid of photographs.

We took a boat opposite Mr. Beckett's house, and paddled slowly with the nearly-flood tide up the Berbice River. It was two o'clock, the hottest time of the day. For three miles we drifted past the chosen haunts of the hoatzins. All were perched in the shade, quiet in the intense heat, squatting prostrate or sleepily preening their plumage. Now and then we saw a bird on her nest, always over the water. If she was sitting on eggs she sat close. If young birds were in the nest she half-crouched, or perched on the rim, so that her body cast a shadow over the young.

The vegetation was not varied. Muckamucka was here and there in the foreground, with an almost solid line of bunduri pimpler or thorn tree. This was the real home of the birds, and this plant forms the background whenever the hoatzin comes to mind. It is a growth which loves the water, and crowds down so that the rising of the tide, whether fresh or brackish, covers the mud in which it stands, so that it appears to be quite as aquatic as the mangrove which, here and there, creeps out alongside it.

The pimpler bears thorns of the first magnitude, often double, recurved and at such diabolically unexpected places, that like barbed wire, it is impossible to grasp anywhere without drawing blood. Such a chevaux-de-frise would defend a trench against the most courageous regiment. The stems were light gray, greening toward the younger shoots, and the foliage was pleasantly divided into double lines of locust-like leaflets.

The plants were in full flower,—dainty, upright panicles of wisteria-like pea-blooms, pale violet and white with tiny buds of magenta. A faint, subdued perfume drifted from them through the tangle of branches. The fruit was ripening on many plants, in clusters of green, semi-circular, flat, kidney pods. The low branches stretched gracefully waterwards in long sweeping curves. On these at a fork or at the crossing of two distinct branches, the hoatzins placed their nests, and with the soft-tissued leaflets they packed their capacious crops and fed their young.

Besides these two plants, which alone may be considered as forming the principal environment, two blooms were conspicuous at this season; a deep-calyxed, round blossom of rich yellow,—an hibiscus, which the Indians called makoe, and from the bark of which they made most excellent rope. The other flower was a vine which crept commonly up over the pimpler trees, regardless of water and thorns, and hung out twin blossoms in profusion, pink and pinkish-white, trumpet-shaped, with flaring lips.

The mid-day life about this haunt of hoatzins was full of interest. Tody-flycatchers of two species, yellow-breasted and streaked, were the commonest birds, and their little homes, like bits of tide-hung drift, swayed from the tips of the pimpler branches. They dashed to and fro regardless of the heat, and whenever we stopped they came within a foot or two, curiously watching our every motion. Kiskadees hopped along the water's edge in the shade, snatching insects and occasionally splashing into the water after small fish. Awkward Guinea green herons, not long out of the nest, crept like shadow silhouettes of birds close to the dark water. High overhead, like flecks of jet against the blue sky, the vultures soared. Green dragonflies whirled here and there, and great blue-black bees fumbled in and out of the hibiscus, yellowed with pollen and too busy to stop a second in their day-long labor.

This little area held very strange creatures as well, some of which we saw even in our few hours' search. Four-eyed fish skittered over the water, pale as the ghosts of fish, and when quiet, showing only as a pair of bubbly eyes. Still more weird hairy caterpillars wriggled their way through the muddy, brackish current—aquatic larvæ of a small moth which I had not seen since I found them in the trenches of Pará.

The only sound at this time of day was a drowsy but penetrating tr-r-r-r-r-p! made by a green-bodied, green-legged grasshopper of good size, whose joy in life seemed to be to lie lengthwise upon a pimpler branch, and skreek violently at frequent intervals, giving his wings a frantic flutter at each utterance, and slowly encircling the stem.

In such environment the hoatzin lives and thrives, and, thanks to its strong body odor, has existed from time immemorial in the face of terrific handicaps. The odor is a strong musky one, not particularly disagreeable. I searched my memory at every whiff for something of which it vividly reminded me, and at last the recollection came to me—the smell, delectable and fearfully exciting in former years—of elephants at a circus, and not altogether elephants either, but a compound of one-sixth sawdust, another part peanuts, another of strange animals and three-sixths swaying elephant. That, to my mind, exactly describes the odor of hoatzins as I sensed it among these alien surroundings.

As I have mentioned, the nest of the hoatzin was invariably built over the water, and we shall later discover the reason for this. The nests were sometimes only four feet above high water, or equally rarely, at a height of forty to fifty feet. From six to fifteen feet included the zone of four-fifths of the nests of these birds. They varied much in solidity, some being frail and loosely put together, the dry, dead sticks which composed them dropping apart almost at a touch. Usually they were as well knitted as a heron's, and in about half the cases consisted of a recent nest built upon the foundations of an old one. There was hardly any cavity at the top, and the coarse network of sticks looked like a precarious resting place for eggs and an exceedingly uncomfortable one for young birds.

When we approached a nest, the occupant paid no attention until we actually came close to a branch, or shook it. She then rose, protesting hoarsely, and lifting wings and tail as she croaked. At the last moment, often when only a yard away, she flew off and away to a distance of fifty feet or more. Watching closely, when she realized that we really had intentions on her nest, she returned and perched fifteen or twenty feet away, croaking continually, her mate a little farther off, and all the hoatzins within sight or hearing joining in sympathetic disharmony, all with synchronous lifting of tail and wings at each utterance.

The voice of the female is appreciably deeper than that of the male, having more of a gurgling character, like one of the notes of a curassow. The usual note of both sexes is an unwritable, hoarse, creaking sound, quite cicada or frog-like.

Their tameness was astounding, and they would often sit unmoved, while we were walking noisily about, or focusing the camera within two yards. If several were sitting on a branch and one was shot, the others would often show no symptoms of concern or alarm, either at the noise of the gun or the fall of their companion. A hoatzin which may have been crouched close to the slain bird would continue to preen its plumage without a glance downward. When the young had attained their first full plumage it was almost impossible to distinguish them from the older members of the flock except by their generally smaller size.

But the heart of our interest in the hoatzins centered in the nestlings. Some kind Providence directed the time of our visit, which I chose against the advice of some of the very inhabitants of New Amsterdam. It turned out that we were on the scene exactly at the right time. A week either way would have yielded much poorer results. The nestlings, in seven occupied nests, observed as we drifted along shore, or landed and climbed among the thorns, were in an almost identical stage of development. In fact, the greatest difference in size occurred between two nestlings of the same brood. Their down was a thin, scanty, fuzzy covering, and the flight feathers were less than a half-inch in length. No age would have showed to better advantage every movement of wings or head.

When a mother hoatzin took reluctant flight from her nest, the young bird at once stood upright and looked curiously in every direction. No slacker he, crouching flat or awaiting his mother's directing cries. From the moment he was left alone he began to depend upon the warnings and signs which his great beady eyes and skinny ears conveyed to him. Hawks and vultures had swept low over his nest and mother unheeded. Coolies in their boats had paddled underneath with no more than a glance upward. Throughout his week of life, as through his parents' and their parents' parents' lives, no danger had disturbed their peaceful existence. Only for a sudden windstorm such as that which the week before had upset nests and blown out eggs, it might be said that for the little hoatzin chicks life held nothing but siestas and munchings of pimpler leaves.

But one little hoatzin, if he had any thoughts such as these, failed to count on the invariable exceptions to every rule, for this day the totally unexpected happened. Fate, in the shape of enthusiastic scientists, descended upon him. He was not for a second nonplussed. If we had concentrated upon him a thousand strong, by boats and by land, he would have fought the good fight for freedom and life as calmly as he waged it against us. And we found him no mean antagonist, and far from reptilian in his ability to meet new and unforeseen conditions.

His mother, who a moment before had been packing his capacious little crop with predigested pimpler leaves, had now flown off to an adjoining group of mangroves, where she and his father croaked to him hoarse encouragement. His flight feathers hardly reached beyond his finger-tips, and his body was covered with a sparse coating of sooty black down. So there could be no resort to flight. He must defend himself, bound to earth like his assailants.

Hardly had his mother left when his comical head, with thick, blunt beak and large intelligent eyes, appeared over the rim of the nest. His alert expression was increased by the suspicion of a crest on his crown where the down was slightly longer. Higher and higher rose his head, supported on a neck of extraordinary length and thinness. No more than this was needed to mark his absurd resemblance to some strange, extinct reptile. A young dinosaur must have looked much like this, while for all that my glance revealed, I might have been looking at a diminutive Galapagos tortoise. Indeed this simile came to mind often when I became more intimate with nestling hoatzins.

Sam, my black tree-climber, kicked off his shoes and began creeping along the horizontal limbs of the pimplers. At every step he felt carefully with a calloused sole in order to avoid the longer of the cruel thorns, and punctuated every yard with some gasp of pain or muttered personal prayer, "Pleas' doan' stick me, Thorns!"

At last his hand touched the branch, and it shook slightly. The young bird stretched his mittened hands high above his head and waved them a moment. With similar intent a boxer or wrestler flexes his muscles and bends his body. One or two uncertain, forward steps brought the bird to the edge of the nest at the base of a small branch. There he stood, and raising one wing leaned heavily against the stern, bracing himself. My man climbed higher and the nest swayed violently.

Now the brave little hoatzin reached up to some tiny side twigs and aided by the projecting ends of dead sticks from the nest, he climbed with facility, his thumbs and forefingers apparently being of more aid than his feet. It was fascinating to see him ascend, stopping now and then to crane his head and neck far out, turtlewise. He met every difficulty with some new contortion of body or limbs, often with so quick or so subtle a shifting as to escape my scrutiny. The branch ended in a tiny crotch and here perforce, ended his attempt at escape by climbing. He stood on the swaying twig, one wing clutched tight, and braced himself with both feet.

Nearer and nearer crept Sam. Not a quiver on the part of the little hoatzin. We did not know it, but inside that ridiculous head there was definite decision as to a deadline. He watched the approach of this great, strange creature—this Danger, this thing so wholly new and foreign to his experience, and doubtless to all the generations of his forbears. A black hand grasped the thorny branch six feet from his perch, and like a flash he played his next trick—the only remaining one he knew, one that set him apart from all modern land birds, as the frog is set apart from the swallow.

The young hoatzin stood erect for an instant, and then both wings of the little bird were stretched straight back, not folded, bird-wise, but dangling loosely and reaching well beyond the body. For a considerable fraction of time he leaned forward. Then without effort, without apparent leap or jump he dived straight downward, as beautifully as a seal, direct as a plummet and very swiftly. There was a scarcely-noticeable splash, and as I gazed with real awe, I watched the widening ripples which undulated over the muddy water—the only trace of the whereabouts of the young bird.

It seemed as if no one, whether ornithologist, evolutionist, poet or philosopher could fail to be profoundly impressed at the sight we had seen. Here I was in a very real, a very modern boat, with the honk of motor horns sounding from the river road a few yards away through the bushes, in the shade of this tropical vegetation in the year nineteen hundred and sixteen; and yet the curtain of the past had been lifted and I had been permitted a glimpse of what must have been common in the millions of years ago. It was a tremendous thing, a wonderful thing to have seen, and it seemed to dwarf all the strange sights which had come to me in all other parts of the earth's wilderness. I had read of these habits and had expected them, but like one's first sight of a volcano in eruption, no reading or description prepares one for the actual phenomenon.

I sat silently watching for the re-appearance of the young bird. We tallied five pairs of eyes and yet many minutes passed before I saw the same little head and emaciated neck sticking out of the water alongside a bit of drift rubbish. The only visible thing was the protruding spikes of the bedraggled tail feathers. I worked the boat in toward the bird, half-heartedly, for I had made up my mind that this particular brave little bit of atavism deserved his freedom, so splendidly had he fought for it among the pimplers. Soon he ducked forward, dived out of sight and came up twenty feet away among an inextricable tangle of vines. I sent a little cheer of well wishing after him and we salvaged Sam.

Then we shoved out the boat and watched from a distance. Five or six minutes passed and a skinny, crooked, two-fingered mitten of an arm reared upward out of the muddy flood and the nestling, black and glistening, hauled itself out of water.

Thus must the first amphibian have climbed into the thin air. But the young hoatzin neither gasped nor shivered, and seemed as self-possessed as if this was a common occurrence in its life. There was not the slightest doubt however, that this was its first introduction to water. Yet it had dived from a height of fifteen feet, about fifty times its own length, as cleanly as a seal leaps from a berg. It was as if a human child should dive two hundred feet!

In fifteen minutes more it had climbed high above the water, and with unerring accuracy directly toward its natal bundle of sticks overhead. The mother now came close, and with hoarse rasping notes and frantic heaves of tail and wings lent encouragement. Just before we paddled from sight, when the little fellow had reached his last rung, he partly opened his beak and gave a little falsetto cry,—a clear, high tone, tailing off into a guttural rasp. His splendid courage had broken at last; he had nearly reached the nest and he was aching to put aside all this terrible responsibility, this pitting of his tiny might against such fearful odds. He wanted to be a helpless nestling again, to crouch on the springy bed of twigs with a feather comforter over him and be stuffed at will with delectable pimpler pap. Such is the normal right destiny of a hoatzin chick, and the whee-og! wrung from him by the reaction of safety seemed to voice all this.

VII

A WILDERNESS LABORATORY

Robinson Crusoe had a wreck well stored with supplies, and we inherited only four walls and a roof. Still, we had a boy Friday—Sam, an ebony Demeraran, exactly half of whose teeth had been lost in the only automobile ride he had ever taken. Sam was sent by some personal Providence—perhaps the god of intelligence bureaus—as the first of our faithful following in Guiana. Sam had formerly been a warden in the Georgetown jail, and rumor had it that he left because he saw "jumbies" in the court where one hundred and nine men had been hung. And surely that was where jumbies would be found if anywhere. Even Crusoe's man must have admitted that. How wardenship could be of aid to us in our scientific work was a puzzle.

Only once before did a servant's previous experience surpass this in utter uselessness. That was when a Russian chauffeur whom I had taken on trial found a cowboy saddle in my attic and seriously and proudly showed me in great detail, with the saddle strapped to the banisters, how with his long Cossack training he could stand on his neck when going at full speed! But Sam, like many another servant of the past, was to prove a treasure.

We had come from New York with a very distinct idea of what we wanted to do, but no idea at all of just how or where we should begin. On kindly but conflicting advice and suggestion, we had searched hither and thither over the coastlands of British Guiana. Everywhere we found drawbacks. We wanted to be near primeval jungle, we wished to be free of mosquitoes and other disturbers of long-continued observation. We desired the seemingly impossible combination of isolation and facility of communication with the outside world.

In a driving, tropical rainstorm I ascended the Essequibo to Bartica, and from the hills, as the sun broke through gray clouds, my friend the rubber planter pointed over two jungle-clad ranges to a great house, a house with many pillars, a house with roof of pale pink like a giant mora in full bloom. Then, like the good fairy prince in a well-regulated tale, he waved his wand toward it, and said, "That is Kalacoon; take it and use it if you want it." Only his wand was a stout walking-stick, and for the nonce the fairy prince had taken the form of a tall, bronzed, very good-looking Englishman, who had carved a rubber plantation out of the very edge of the jungle, and with wife and small daughter lived in the midst of his clean-barked trees.

And now we had had a gift of a great house in the heart of the Guiana wilderness, a house built many years before by one who was Protector of the Indians. This we were to turn into a home and a laboratory to study the wild things about us—birds, animals, and insects; not to collect them primarily, but to photograph, sketch, and watch them day after day, learning of those characters and habits which cannot be transported to a museum. And exactly this had not been done before; hence it took on new fascination.

I had never given serious thought to the details of housekeeping, and I suddenly realized how much for granted one takes things in civilization. In New York I had possessed beds and baths and tables, dishes and cooks and towels, in a spirit of subconsciousness which made one think of them only if they were not there. Now I had suddenly to think about all these and other things particularly hard. If it had been the usual camping duffle of hammock, net, tarpaulin, and frying-pan, that would have been simple. But when the sugar-bowl is empty, one becomes at once acutely conscious of it; if it is not, while the hand unbidden manipulates the tongs, the brain distils or listens to thoughts of opera, science, or war. Optical eclipse, impelled by familiarity, is often total. However, we found the Georgetown stores well stocked, and whenever we purchased a useless thing we found that it could be used for something else. And sooner or later, everything we possessed was used for something else, thereby moving one of us to suggest a society for reducing household articles by half.

But while it was well enough to make a lark of such things when one had to, we begrudged every minute taken from the new field outspread before us in every direction. For Kalacoon was on a hilltop and looked out on the northern third of the horizon over the expanse of three mighty rivers—the Essequibo, the Mazaruni, and the Cuyuni. And around us was high second growth, losing itself to the southward in a gigantic, abrupt wall of the real jungle—the jungle that I knew by experience was more wonderful than any of the forests of the Far East, of Burma or Ceylon or Malaysia.

We sat down on some packing-boxes after our first day of indoor labor, and watched the sun settle slowly beyond the silvered Mazaruni. And a song, not of the tropics, but bubbling and clear and jubilant as that of our northern singers, rang out from the single tall palm standing in our front compound. Clinging to the topmost frond was an oriole, jet as night, with the gold of sunshine on crown and shoulders and back. He was singing. While he sang, a second oriole swooped upward between two vanes of a frond to a small ball of fibers knotted close to the midrib. The event had come and it developed swiftly.

We seized a great ladder and by superhuman efforts raised it little by little, until it rested high against the smooth trunk. One of us then mounted the swaying rungs, reckless with excitement, and thrust his hand into the nest. It was withdrawn and went to his mouth, and down he came. To our impatient, impolite inquiries, he answered only with inarticulate mumblings and grunts. He reached the ground and into his pursed hands carefully regurgitated an egg—white, with clustered markings of lavender and sepia about the larger end. We looked at each other and grinned. Words seemed superfluous. Later I believe we quieted down and danced some kind of a war-dance. Our feelings had then reached the stage where they could at least be expressed in action. Perhaps it was not altogether the scientific joy of gazing at and possessing the first known egg of the moriche oriole. I know that by sheer perversity I kept thinking of the narrow-gauge canyon of a city street, as I gloried in this cosmic openness of tropical river and jungle and sunset. Only in an aeroplane have I experienced an equal spatial elation.

Our bird-nester told us that there was a second egg, and said something about not daring to put two in his mouth lest he slip and swallow both. But later, in a moment of weakness, he admitted the real reason,—that he had not the heart, after the glorious song and this splendid omen of our work, to do more than divide the spoils fifty-fifty with the orioles. Self-control was rewarded, as the other egg hatched and we learned a secret of the juvenile plumage of these birds, while the songs of the cadouries, as the Indians call them, were heard month after month at our windows.

When the idea of a tropical research station occurred to me, the first person with whom I discussed the matter was Colonel Roosevelt. In all of my scientific undertakings under the auspices of the New York Zoölogical Society, I have found his attitude always one of whole-souled sympathy, checked and practicalized by trenchant criticism and advice. For Colonel Roosevelt, besides his other abilities and interests, is one of the best of our American naturalists. To a solid foundation of scientific knowledge, gained direct from literature, he adds one of the widest and keenest of experiences in the field. His published work is always based on a utilization of the two sources, and is characterized by a commendable restraint and the leaven of a philosophy which combines an unalterable adhesion to facts, with moderation of theory and an unhesitating use of the three words which should be ready for instant use in the vocabulary of every honest scientist, "I don't know."

My object in founding the research station was to destroy the bogie of danger and difficulty supposed to attend all tropical investigation, and to show that scientists from north temperate regions could accomplish keen, intensive, protracted scientific work in tropical jungles without injury to health or detriment to the facility of mental activity, and at extremely moderate expense. This will open to direct personal investigation, regions which, more than any others, promise dynamic results from evolutional study, and will supplement the work of museums with correlated researches upon living and freshly killed organisms. This was a "progressive" doctrine which Colonel Roosevelt endorsed with enthusiasm, and after we had brought semblance of a comfortable American home to great, rambling Kalacoon, we were able to welcome Colonel and Mrs. Roosevelt as the first visitors to the actual accomplishment of the project which months before, we had so enthusiastically discussed at Oyster Bay.

The jungles of South America were no novelty to Colonel Roosevelt, but to be able to traverse them over smooth, easy trails, in a comfortable temperature and with no annoyance of flies or mosquitoes, was an experience which none of us had enjoyed before. To Mrs. Roosevelt it was all new—the huge, buttressed trunks, the maze of lianas in tangles, loops and spirals, the sudden burst of pink or lavender blossoms in a sunlit spot, and the piercingly sweet, liquid notes of the goldbird, "like the bird of Siegfried," as she aptly said. The coolie workmen in their Eastern garb, the Akawai Indian hunters and their tattooed squaws along the trail, all aroused that enthusiasm which a second meeting can never quite elicit.

Most memorable to me were the long walks which Colonel Roosevelt and I took on the Kaburi Trail, that narrow path which is the only entrance by land to all the great hinterland lying between the Essequibo and Mazaruni Rivers. Majestically the massive trees rose on either side, so that while our contracted aisle was as lofty as the nave of a cathedral, yet it was densely shaded by the interlocking foliage high overhead. Our progress was thus through a glorified tunnel; we traveled molewise with only here and there a glimpse of the sky. Every walk was filled to the brim for me with that infinitely satisfying joy, derived from frank, sympathetic communion with an enthusiastic, true friend. I know of no earthly pleasure more to be desired. Perhaps this is because friends are so rare with whom one can be wholly natural, with one's guard completely down, unafraid of any misunderstanding—an omnimental communion.

It was with dismay, at the end of one long walk, that I realized we had forgotten to search for the tropical creatures for which we had presumably set out. We had kept the jungle birds and animals well at distance by a constant flow of human speech—argumentative, eulogistic, condemnatory—of literary and field and museum doings of the scientific world.

But we did not wholly neglect the life around us and one of the last problems which we solved that day was that of a small voice, one of those apparently unattached sounds which come from no definite place, nor are referable to any certain source. It might have been a cicada or other insect, it could well have come from the throat of a bird. Were we in the heart of a city we should unhesitatingly have pronounced it a jewsharp played very badly. We set out in search, we stalked it through the thin underbrush, we scanned every branch with our glasses, and when we found it was bird and not insect we shamelessly played upon its feelings and squeaked after the manner of a stricken nestling. We saw that it was a small flycatcher, green with waistcoat of lemon-yellow. Finally after we had learned its fashion of flight, the stratum of jungle it inhabited and its notes, I secured it. Not until then did we perceive that concealed on its head it wore a glorious crown of orange and gold. When my reference books arrive, and we learn the technical name of this little golden-crowned flycatcher or cotinga, I do not think that this title will persist as vividly as the "jewsharp bird of Kaburi trail."

Close to where we walked on those first days, we were later to find our best hunting. During the next few months all the more interesting animals of this part of South America were shot or their presence noticed; jaguars, tapirs, deer, peccaries, howling monkeys, vampires, agoutis, jaguarondis, otters, sloths, and armadillos. Hosts of birds, almost half the entire number of species found in the Colony, made their home hereabouts, macaws, bellbirds, curassows, trumpeters, toucans, the great harpy eagle and the tiniest of iridescent hummingbirds.

Within a week our great front room, full thirty by sixty feet, with sixteen large windows, was a laboratory in appearance and odor. Hundreds of jars and vials, vivaria and insectaries, microscopes, guns, and cameras, with all their details and mysterious inner workings, left no table vacant. With book-shelves up, there remained only the walls, which little by little became mosaics of maps, diagrams, sketches, drying skins, Indian weapons, birds' nests and shot-holes. Whiffs of formaline, chloroform, and xylol, together with the odors of occasional mislaid or neglected specimens, left no doubt as to the character of the room. We found that the tradewind came from the front, and also that we had much to discuss after the lamps were put out; so we turned the couches into their rightful functions of cots, and the three of us slept scattered here and there in the great room.

The vampire bats never allowed us to become bored. There were no mosquitoes or flies, so we used no nets; but for months we burned a lantern. Low around our heads swept the soft wings of the little creatures, while the bat enthusiast now and then fired his auxiliary pistol. Later we found that a score of them roosted behind a broken clapboard, and, by spreading a seine below and around this, we were able to capture and examine the entire colony at will. Tarantulas were common, but not in the least offensive, and we learned to know where to look for a big black fellow and a small gray one who kept the room free from cockroaches. One or two scorpions were caught indoors, but the three centipedes which appeared occasionally were those which had been brought in and were always escaping from a defective vivarium. There were no other dangers or inconveniences, if we can apply such terms to these comparatively harmless creatures.

This was the background of our labors, our laboratory as our English visitors called it: cool in the daytime, cold at night, where one could work as well as in the north, and where a morning's tramp usually furnished material sufficient for a week of research. We came to know it as the house of a thousand noises. The partitions, like those of all tropical houses, extended only part way to the ceiling, so, as some one has said, one enjoyed about the privacy of a goldfish. It would have been a terrible place for a victim of insomnia; but when we were kept awake by noises it was because we were interested in them. After a day's hard work in the jungle, it must indeed be a bad conscience or a serious physical ailment which keeps one awake a minute after one rolls up in his blanket. Through all the months of varying tropical seasons we slept as soundly as we should at home. I can do with five or six hours' sleep the year round, and I begrudged even this in the tropical wonderland, where my utmost efforts seemed to result in such slight inroads into our tremendous zoölogical ignorance. At night I spent many wonderful hours, leaning first out of one, then out of another window, or occasionally going down the outside lattice stairway and strolling about the compound.

No two nights were alike, although almost all were peaceful, with hardly a breath of air stirring—just the cool, velvet touch of the tropics, always free from any trace of the heat of the day. Whether dark rich olive under crescent or starlight, or glowing silvery-gray in the flood of the full moon, the forest, so quiet, so motionless all about me, was always mysterious, always alluring. To the north, at the foot of the hill, lay the dark surface of the great river, its waters one amber, homogeneous flood, yet drawn from a thousand tributaries: hidden creeks seeping through mossy jungles far beyond the Spanish border, brown cascades filtering through gravel which gleamed with yellow gold and sparkled with the light from uncut diamonds. And to the south rose the wall of the jungle itself, symbol of all that is wild and untamed in nature.

Yet I am never conscious of the bloody fang, the poison tooth, of the wilderness. The peace of this jungle at night was the same peace as that of the trees in our city parks. I knew that well within my horizon, jaguars and pumas were stalking their prey, while here and there on the forest floor bushmasters lay coiled like mats of death. But quite as vividly could I picture the stray cats pouncing on sleeping sparrows in the shrubbery of Washington Square, or the screech owls working havoc in the glades of Central Park where the glare of the electric lights is less violent. And I have not forgotten the two-score gulls and swans with torn throats—a single night's work of wild mink in the Bronx. Nature is the same everywhere; only here the sparrows are not alien immigrants, and the light is not measured in kilowatts, and the hacka tigers are not so sated that they kill for pleasure.

A sound broke in upon my reverie, so low at first that it seemed but the droning hum of a beetle's wing echoing against the hollow shield of their ebony cases. It was deep, soothing, almost hypnotic; one did not want it to cease. Then it gained in volume and depth, and from the heart of the bass there arose a terrible, subdued shrilling—a muffled, raucous grating which touched some secret chord of long-past fear. The whole effect was most terrifying, but still one did not desire it to cease. In itself it seemed wholly suited to its present jungle setting; the emotion it aroused was alien to all modern life. My mind sped swiftly back over the intervening years of sound, over the jeering chorus of Malay gibbons, the roars of anger of orangutans, four-handing themselves through the swaying Bornean jungle, and on past the impudent chatter of the gray langurs of Kashmir deodars. Memory came to rest in a tent-boat, seven years ago and not many more miles distant, when I heard my first red howlers. Then I shared my thrill. Now all with me were asleep, and alone I reached far out into the night and with mouth and ears absorbed every vibration of the wonderful chorus.

In spite of all this variety and immeasurable diversity, I came to perceive a definite sequence of many daily and nightly events, as I observed them from Kalacoon windows. Not only did the sun rise invariably in the east and the tradewinds blow regularly every afternoon, but a multitude of organic beings timed their activities to these elemental phenomena. At half after five, when it was just light enough to see distinctly, I went out into the calm dawn. The quiet of the great spaces at this hour was absolute. No matter how tempestuous the evening before or the night, the hours of early morning were peaceful. Not a leaf stirred. The tide flowed silently up or down or for a time held itself motionless. At the flood the mirror surface would occasionally be shattered for a moment far from shore, where a porpoise or a great lucannani rolled, or a crocodile or a water mama nosed for breath. The calm was invariable, but the air might be crystal clear to the horizon, or so drenched in mist that the nearest foliage was invisible.

No matter how early I went out into the dawn, the wrens were always singing—though they were recent arrivals at Kalacoon. Then, within a few minutes, the chachalacas began their loud duets, answering one another in couples from first one, then another direction, until the air was ringing with hanaqua! hanaqua! hanaqua! Dragonflies appeared in mid-air, martins left their nests among the beams, parrakeets crossed over from their roosts, and swifts met them coming from their sleeping quarters in hollow trees. The quaint little grass-quits began their absurd dance against gravity, and blatant kiskadees ushered in the sun and day.

Then came an interval when every one was too busy feeding to sing, and the wren's notes were hushed by an astounding succession of tiny spiders, and the chirps of young martins were smothered in winged ants. Swiftly the sun rose and the heat dissipated the mists and lured out a host of flying things. Even at mid-day one might sit at a window and take notes continuously of lesser happenings, while now and then something of such note occurred that one could only watch and wonder. This might be a migration of sulphur butterflies, thousands flying steadily toward the southeast hour after hour, day after day. Or a host of hummingbirds of nearly a score of species would descend upon the cashew blossoms in the rear compound. Most exciting was a flight of winged termites. In the rainy season the clouds would bank up about mid-day, and showers fall with true tropical violence. After an exceptionally long downpour the marriage flight would take place and logs, dead branches, and even the steps and beams of Kalacoon would give up their multitudes. From great rotted stumps the insects poured forth like curling smoke. The breeze carried them slowly off toward the west, and at the first hint the birds gathered to the feast. Only Rangoon vultures surpassed them in numbers and voracity. The air was fretted with a kaleidoscopic network of swifts—from great, collared fellows to the tiny dwellers in palms—with swallows, martins, and, if late enough, nighthawks. Fork-tailed flycatchers swept by scores round the vortex of insects, while a fluttering host of kiskadees, tanagers, anis, thrushes, and wrens gleaned as best they could from grass-top or branch. In ten minutes the whole flight had vanished. Any queen termite which ran that gauntlet safely, deserved to found her colony without further molestation.

Although I might have stalked and watched the white campañeros for a week past, yet whenever there came to ear the anvil-like kong! kang! or the ringing, sonorous kaaaaaaaaaaang! of a bell-bird three miles away, I always stopped work and became one great ear to this jungle angelus.

One could watch the changing seasons of the great tropical jungle from the same wonder windows of Kalacoon. A dull rose suffused the tree-tops, deepening day by day, and finally the green appeared, picked out everywhere by a myriad blossoms—magenta, mauve, maroon, carmine, rose, salmon-pink. Yet the glass showed only top-gallant foliage of wilted, parti-colored leaves. Illusion upon illusion: these were not wilted, but newborn leaves which thus in their spring glory rivaled our autumnal tints. One never forgot the day when the first mora burst into full bloom—a great mound of lavender pigment, swung nearly two hundred feet in mid-air, dominating all the surrounding jungle growth. This was the lush, prodigal way in which the tropics announced spring.

Whether I had spent the day in hard tramping or stalking in the jungle, or at my laboratory table trying to disentangle the whys and wherefores from the physical skein of my specimens, toward sunset I always went down to the cement floor of an orchid-house long fallen in decay. This was under the open sky, and from this spot on the highest hilltop in all this region, I watched the end of the day.

No sunset should ever be described, and the Kalacoon sunsets were too wonderful for aught but wordless reverence. They were explosions of wild glory, palettefuls of unheard-of pigments splashed across the sky, and most bewildering because they were chiefly in the east or north. This evening on which I write was sealed with a sunset of negligible yellow, but the east was a splendor of forest fires and minarets, great golden castles and pale-green dragons and snow-capped mountains all conceived and molded from glorious tumbled cloud-masses, and ultimately melting back into them again. The moriche orioles met the beauty of the heavens with their silver notes, and as the sky cooled, there arose the sweet, trilled cadence of the little tinamou heralding the voices of night. The silvery collared nighthawks began their eternal questioning who-are-you! who-are-you! and the coolness banished all thought of the blistering sunshine now pouring down upon the waters of the Pacific.

Not until later, when the night-life was fairly under way, and all the beings of the sun hidden and asleep, did the deep bass rumble of the big toads commence, and the tinkling chorus of the little frogs. Last of all came the essence of the nocturnal—the sound furthest removed from day. All other voices seemed to become for an instant hushed, and the poor-me-one spoke—a wail which rose, trembled, and broke into a falling cadence of hopeless sighs.

And now, with the crescent moon writing its heliograph cipher upon the water, a new sound arose, low and indistinct, lost for a moment, then rising and lost again. Then it rang out rich and harmonious, the full-throated paddling chanty of a gold-boat of blacks coming down river with their tiny pokes of glittering dust. It tore at the heart-strings of memory, and in its wildness, its sad minor strain, was strangely moving. The steersman set the words and in high, quavering tones led the chorus, which broke in, took up the phrase, different each time, and repeated it twice over, with a sweet pathos, a finality of cadence which no trained white chorus could reproduce.