ighted our childhood in the West
India cabinet at home.

We lingered long, filling our eyes with beauty: and then rowed
away. What more was to be done? Through that very chasm we were to
have passed out to the cave. And yet the sight of this delicious
nook repaid us--so more than one of the party thought--for our
disappointment. There was another Guacharo cave in the Monos
channel, more under the lee. We would try that to-morrow.

As the sun sank that evening, we sat ourselves upon the eastern
rocks, and gazed away into the pale, sad, boundless west; while
Venus hung high, not a point, as here, but a broad disc of light,
throwing a long gleam over the sea. Fish skipped over the clear
calm water; and above, pelicans--the younger brown, the older gray--
wheeled round and round in lordly flight, paused, gave a sudden
half-turn, then fell into the water with widespread wings, and after
a splash, rose with another skipjack in their pouch. As it grew
dark, dark things came trooping over the sea, by twos and threes,
then twenty at a time, all past us toward a cave near by. Birds we
fancied them at first, of the colour and size of starlings; but they
proved to be bats, and bats, too, which have the reputation of
catching fish. So goes the tale, believed by some who see them
continually, and have a keen eye for nature; and who say that the
bat sweeps the fish up off the top of the water with the scoop-like
membrane of his hind-legs and tail. For this last fact I will not
vouch. But I am assured that fish scales were found, after I left
the island, in the stomachs of these bats; and that of the fact of
their picking up small fish there can be no doubt. 'You could not,'
says a friend, 'be out at night in a boat, and hear their continual
swish, swish, in the water, without believing it.' If so, the habit
is a quaint change of nature in them; for they belong, I am assured
by my friend Professor Newton, not to the insect-eating, but to the
fruit-eating family of bats, who, in the West as in the East Indies,
may be seen at night hovering round the Mango-trees, and destroying
much more fruit than they eat.

So we sat watching the little dark things flit by, like the
gibbering ghosts of the suitors in the Odyssey, into the darkness of
the cave; and then turned to long talk of things concerning which it
is best nowadays not to write; till it was time to feel our way
indoors, by such lig