is wrong with you?"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Martin, faintly; "I think there is
something wet about my feet."

Turning up the sheet, he found that Martin's feet were covered with
blood! For a few seconds the hermit growled forth a number of
apparently very pithy sentences in Portuguese, in a deep guttural voice,
which awakened Barney with a start. Springing from his hammock with a
bound like a tiger, he exclaimed, "Och! ye blackguard, would ye murther
the boy before me very nose?" and seizing the hermit in his powerful
grasp, he would infallibly have hurled him, big though he was, through
his own doorway, had not Martin cried out, "Stop, stop, Barney. It's
all right; he's done nothing:" on hearing which the Irishman loosened
his hold, and turned towards his friend.

"What's the matter, honey?" said Barney, in a soothing tone of voice, as
a mother might address her infant son. The hermit whose composure had
not been in the slightest degree disturbed, here said--"The poor child
has been sucked by a vampire bat."

"Ochone!" groaned Barney, sitting down on the table, and looking at his
host with a face of horror.

"Yes, these are the worst animals in Brazil for sucking the blood of men
and cattle. I find it quite impossible to keep my mules alive, they are
so bad."

Barney groaned.

"They have killed two cows which I tried to keep here, and one young
horse--a foal you call him, I think; and now I have no cattle remaining,
they are so bad."

Barney groaned again, and the hermit went on to enumerate the wicked
deeds of the vampire-bats, while he applied poultices of certain herbs
to Martin's toe, in order to check the bleeding, and then bandaged it
up; after which he sat down to relate to his visitors, the manner in
which the bat carries on its bloody operations. He explained, first of
all, that the vampire-bats are so large and ferocious that they often
kill horses and cattle by sucking their blood out. Of course they
cannot do this at one meal, but they attack the poor animals again and
again, and the blood continues to flow from the wounds they make long
afterwards, so that the creatures attacked soon grow weak and die. They
attack men, too,--as Martin knew to his cost; and they usually fix upon
the toes and other extremities. So gentle are they in their operations,
that sleepers frequently do not feel the puncture, which they make, it
is supposed, with the sharp hooked nail of their thumb; and the