making up the fire:-" What is that?-Que es eso?"

"Los tigres," was the reply.

The noise of tigers had awakened me, and they continued with their horrid noise for several hours, sometimes near, and at other times away in the distance. I had heard tigers before in Honduras, but never for any great length of time; and then it was always one loud noble tone, with a succession of four or five tones decreasing in loudness and like the echoes of the first. But these were ramping and roaring tigers, maddened with wild passion, and ready for any kind and any amount of mischief.

I confess I was dreadfully afraid, expecting every moment to see half-a-dozen tigers rush in. It was their mating season.*

* Some years after my visit to Buen Pastor I saw a print taken from Heywood Hardy's picture of "Lions at mating season," with an extract from the Iliad that illustrated the situation :

"Fierce as conflicting fires the combat burns,

And now it rises, now it sinks by turns."

In a gloomy night, illuminated only by the burning of the dry savannah grass, or made more dismal by the ruddy smoke, Humboldt's horses were frightened by the yell of an animal that proved

D

And there was M. Edmond sleeping with all the security of unconscious childhood.

In the tropics no part of a traveller's day is more pleasant and interesting than that from four to eight in the morning.

On caña San Juan it was most delightful: so calm and yet so cool. The soft brightness of the silent stars, always to me the symbols of heavenly purity and bliss, and the impalpable blending of sky and wood and water; the dead stillness of the morning, broken only by the monotony of the paddles striking against the sides of the corial; and, at long intervals, the deep baying sound of the pajaro de perro, the dogbird; the silence of my companions, whose apparently mere mechanical paddling might have led to a belief in their automatism, all tended to give an air of enchantment to the scene. The large forest trees, thickly binding the distant

to be a large jaguar that had roamed among those mountains for three years, carrying off horses and mules, and eluding the pursuit of the boldest hunters. He saw also another jaguar of prodigious length, "which surpassed that of all the tigers of India I had seen in the collections of Europe."-HUMBOLDT, quoted by Milner.

An Indian Settlement.

51

banks, might, as we glide along, be anything the imagination pleases-the walls of an enchanted palace-the ruins of a Rhine castle-or the merlonned walls of the morada (mansion) of a hidalgo of ancient Castilian pedigree-a chapel on a rock-or the ruins of a cathedral. And then the sombre reflection of the woods in the water, disturbed by the paddles, made hideous and fantastic forms. As the light increased, it was interesting to observe the fading away of the homogeneous colouring, and, as in a dissolving view, the blue of heaven, the green of the woods, the bright yellow of the clay banks, and the silvery whiteness of the placid Caña, all appearing more and more distinctly. Then the concert of birds began, and the business of the day was opened with gladness and general thanksgiving.

At eleven o'clock we stopped at the settlement of an Indian family and took breakfast, the usual tasajo and cassava with the addition of a fish, caught by one of our men, which we enjoyed. By this time the master of the place, who had gone into the bush before our arrival,