g as a yard stick wriggling
along my mosquito curtains.'

'Ah! How could you see it in the dark?'

'Why, the beggar carried two lamps ahead of him, and he had a smaller chap
with a light. Ugh!'

'These were some good specimens of the _Lampyridae_, no doubt.'

'Well, perhaps; but having such a nice long name doesn't make them a bit
less hideous to me. Then in the morning when I looked into the glass I
didn't know myself from Adam. I had a black eye that some bug or other
had given me--I dare say he also had a nice long name. I had a lump on my
brow as large as a Spanish onion, and my nose was swollen and as big as a
bladder of lard. From top to toe I was covered with hard knots, as if I'd
been to Donnybrook Fair, and what with aching and itching it would have
been a comfort to me to have jumped out of my skin.'

'Was that all?' I said, laughing.

'Not quite. I went to take up a book to fling at a monster spider in the
corner, and put my hand on a scorpion. I cracked him and crushed the
spider, and went to have my bath, only to find I had to fish out about
twenty long-named indescribables that had committed suicide during the
night. Other creepies had been drowned in the ewer. I found earwigs in my
towels, grasshoppers in my clothes, and wicked-looking little beetles even
in my hairbrushes. This may be a land flowing with milk and honey and all
the rest of it, Murdoch, but it is also a land crawling with
creepie-creepies.'

'Well, anyhow,' said Dugald, 'here comes your mule. Mount and have a ride,
and we'll forget everything but the pleasures of the chase. Come, I think
I know where there is a jaguar--an immense great brute. I saw him killing
geese not three days ago.'

'Oh, that will be grand!' cried Archie, now all excitement.

And five minutes afterwards Dugald and he were off to the hills.

But in two days more we would be off to the hills in earnest.

For this tour we would not of our own free-will have made half the
preparations Moncrieff insisted on, and perhaps would hardly have provided
ourselves with tents. However, we gave in to his arrangements in every
way, and certainly we had no cause to repent it.

The guide--he was to be called our _cacique_ for the time being--that
Moncrieff appointed had been a Gaucho malo, a pampas Cain. No one ever
knew half the crimes the fellow had committed, and I suppose he himself
had forgotten. But he was a reformed man and really a Christian, and it is
difficult t