anity,
which proceeded from that strange animal, the porcupine with a
prehensile tail, {248b} who prowls in the tree-tops all night, and
sleeps in them all day, spending his idle hours in making this
hideous smell. Probably he or his ancestors have found it pay as a
protection; for no jaguar or tiger-cat, it is to be presumed, would
care to meddle with anything so exquisitely nasty, especially when
it is all over sharp prickles.

Once--I should know the spot again among a thousand--where we
scrambled over a stony brook just like one in a Devonshire wood, the
boulders and the little pools between them swarmed with things like
scarlet and orange fingers, or sticks of sealing-wax, which we
recognised, and, looking up, saw a magnificent Bois Chataigne,
{249a}--Pachira, as the Indians call it,--like a great horse-
chestnut, spreading its heavy boughs overhead. And these were the
fallen petals of its last-night's crop of flowers, which had opened
there, under the moonlight, unseen and alone. Unseen and alone?
How do we know that?

Then we emerged upon a beach, the very perfection of typical tropic
shore, with little rocky coves, from one to another of which we had
to ride through rolling surf, beneath the welcome shade of low
shrub-fringed cliffs; while over the little mangrove-swamp at the
mouth of the glen, Tocuche rose sheer, like M'Gillicuddy's Reeks
transfigured into one huge emerald.

We turned inland again, and stopped for luncheon at a clear brook,
running through a grove of Cacao and Bois Immortelles. We sat
beneath the shade of a huge Bamboo clump; cut ourselves pint-stoups
out of the joints; and then, like great boys, got, some of us at
least, very wet in fruitless attempts to catch a huge cray-fish nigh
eighteen inches long, blue and gray, and of a shape something
between a gnat and a spider, who, with a wife and child, had taken
up his abode in a pool among the spurs of a great Bois Immortelle.
However, he was too nimble for us; and we went on, and inland once
more, luckily not leaving our bamboo stoups behind.

We descended, I remember, to the sea-shore again, at a certain
Maraccas Bay, and had a long ride along bright sands, between surf
and scrub; in which ride, by the by, the civiliser of Montserrat and
I, to avoid the blinding glare of the sand, rode along the firm sand
between the sea and the lagoon, through the low wood of Shore Grape
and Mahaut, Pinguin and Sw