ut hundreds of fine meshes, and the sole contact
with the earth is through twin living boles, pulsing with swift
running sap, whose lichened bark and moonlit foliage excel any
tapestry of man's devising.

Perhaps it is atavistic--this desire to rest and swing in a hamaca.
For these are not unlike the treetop couches of our arboreal
ancestors, such a one as I have seen an orang-utan weave in a few
minutes in the swaying crotch of a tree. At any rate, the hammock is
not dependent upon four walls, upon rooms and houses, and it partakes
altogether of the wilderness. Its movement is aeolian--yielding to
every breath of air. It has even its own weird harmony--for I have
often heard a low, whistling hum as the air rushed through the cordage
mesh. In a sudden tropical gale every taut strand of my hamaca has
seemed a separate, melodious, orchestral note, while I was buffeted to
and fro, marking time to some rhythmic and reckless tune of the wind
playing fortissimo on the woven strings about me. The climax of this
musical outburst was not without a mild element of danger--sufficient
to create that enviable state of mind wherein the sense of security
and the knowledge that a minor catastrophe may perhaps be brought
about are weighed one against the other.

Special, unexpected, and interesting minor dangers are also the
province of the hamaca. Once, in the tropics, a great fruit fell on
the elastic strands and bounced upon my body. There was an ominous
swish of the air in the sweeping arc which this missile described,
also a goodly shower of leaves; and since the fusillade took place at
midnight, it was, all in all, a somewhat alarming visitation. However,
there were no honorable scars to mark its advent; and what is more
important, from all my hundreds of hammock nights, I have no other
memory of any actual or threatened danger which was not due to human
carelessness or stupidity. It is true that once, in another continent,
by the light of a campfire, I saw the long, liana-like body of a
harmless tree-snake wind down from one of my fronded bed-posts and,
like a living woof following its shuttle, weave a passing pattern of
emerald through the pale meshes. But this heralded no harm, for the
poisonous reptiles of that region never climb; and so, since I was
worn out by a hard day, I shut my eyes and slept neither better nor
worse because of the transient confidence of a neighborly serpent.

As a matter of fact, the wilderness prov