rney.

From Venezuela to Paraguay there was no more ocean to cross, and there
were frequent places for rest when Bob and his band desired. Groves
there were, strange groves--some where Brazil nuts grew, and some where
oranges were as common as apples in New England. There were chocolate
trees and banana palms. There were pepper bushes, gay as our holly trees
at Christmastime. Great flowering trees held out their blossom cups to
brilliant hummingbirds hovering by hundreds all about them. Was there
one among them with a ruby throat, like that of the hummingbird who
feasted in the Cardinal-Flower Path near Peter Piper's home? Maybe 't
was the self-same bird--who knows? And let's see--Peter Piper himself
would be coming soon, would he not, to teeter and picnic along some
pleasant Brazilian shore?

Perhaps Bob and Peter and the hummingbird, who had been summer neighbors
in North America, would meet again now and then in that far south
country. But I do not think they would know each other if they did. They
had all seemed too busy with their own affairs to get acquainted.

Besides the groves where the nuts and fruit and flowers grew, the
vagabonds passed over forests so dense and tangled that Bob caught never
a glimpse of the monkeys playing there: big brown ones, with heads of
hair that looked like wigs, and tiny white ones, timid and gentle, and
other kinds, too, all of them being very wise in their wild ways--as
wise, perhaps, as a hand-organ monkey, and much, much happier.

No, I don't think Bob saw the monkeys, but he must have caught glimpses
of some members of the Parrot Family, for there were so many of them;
and I'm sure he heard the racket they made when they talked together.
One kind had feathers soft as the blue of a pale hyacinth flower, and a
beak strong enough to crush nuts so hard-shelled that a man could not
easily crack them with a hammer. But all that was as nothing to Bob. For
't was not grove or forest or beast or bird that the vagabonds were
seeking.

When they had crossed the Amazon River, some of the band stopped in
places that seemed inviting. But Bob and the rest of the company went on
till they crossed the Paraguay River; and there, in the western part of
that country, they made themselves at home. A strange, topsy-turvy land
it is--as queer in some ways as the Wonderland Alice entered when she
went through the Looking-Glass; for in Paraguay January comes in the
middle of summer; and the hot, m