ay fin among the ripples.

So we rode back, along the Cocal and along that wonderful green
glade, where I, staring at Noranteas in tree-tops, instead of at the
ground beneath my horse's feet, had the pleasure of being swallowed
up--my horse's hindquarters at least--in the very same slough which
had engulfed M---'s mule three days before, and got a roll in much
soft mud. Then up to ---'s camp, where we expected breakfast, not
with greediness, though we had been nigh six hours in the saddle,
but with curiosity. For he had promised to send out the hunters for
all game that could be found, and give us a true forest meal; and we
were curious to taste what lapo, quenco, guazupita-deer, and other
strange meats might be like. Nay, some of us agreed, that if the
hunters had but brought in a tender young red monkey, {282a} we
would surely eat him too, if it were but to say that we had done it.
But the hunters had had no luck. They had brought in only a Pajui,
{282b} an excellent game bird; an Ant-eater, {282c} and a great
Cachicame, or nine-banded Armadillo. The ant-eater the foolish
fellows had eaten themselves--I would have given them what they
asked for his skeleton; but the Armadillo was cut up and hashed for
us, and was eaten, to the last scrap, being about the best game I
ever tasted. I fear he is a foul feeder at times, who by no means
confines himself to roots, or even worms. If what I was told be
true, there is but too much probability for Captain Mayne Reid's
statement, that he will eat his way into the soft parts of a dead
horse, and stay there until he has eaten his way out again. But, to
do him justice, I never heard him accused, like the giant Armadillo
{282d} of the Main, of digging dead bodies out of their graves, as
he is doing in a very clever drawing in Mr. Wood's Homes without
Hands. Be that as it may, the Armadillo, whatever he feeds on, has
the power of transmuting it into most delicate and wholesome flesh.

Meanwhile--and hereby hangs a tale--I was interested, not merely in
the Armadillo, but in the excellent taste with which it, and
everything else, was cooked in a little open shed over a few stones
and firesticks. And complimenting my host thereon, I found that he
had, there in the primeval forest, an admirable French cook, to whom
I begged to be introduced at once. Poor fellow! A little lithe
Parisian, not thirty years old, he had got thither by a wild road