quenched, a new world is born. The leaves and blossoms of
the day are at rest, and the birds and insects sleep. New blooms open,
strange scents pour forth. Even our dull senses respond to these; for
just as the eye is dimmed, so are the other senses quickened in the
sudden night of the jungle. Nearby, so close that one can reach out
and touch them, the pale Cereus moons expand, exhaling their
sweetness, subtle breaths of fragrance calling for the very life of
their race to the whirring hawkmoths. The tiny miller who, through the
hours of glare has crouched beneath a leaf, flutters upward, and the
trail of her perfume summons her mate perhaps half a mile down wind.
The civet cat, stimulated by love or war, fills the glade with an odor
so pungent that it seems as if the other senses must mark it.

Although there may seem not a breath of air in motion, yet the tide of
scent is never still. One's moistened finger may reveal no cool side,
since there is not the vestige of a breeze; but faint odors arrive,
become stronger, and die away, or are wholly dissipated by an onrush
of others, so musky or so sweet that one can almost taste them. These
have their secret purposes, since Nature is not wasteful. If she
creates beautiful things, it is to serve some ultimate end; it is her
whim to walk in obscure paths, but her goal is fixed and immutable.
However, her designs are hidden and not easy to decipher; at best, one
achieves, not knowledge, but a few isolated facts.

Sport in a hammock might, by the casual thinker, be considered as
limited to dreams of the hunt and chase. Yet I have found at my
disposal a score of amusements. When the dusk has just settled down,
and the little bats fill every glade in the forest, a box of beetles
or grasshoppers--or even bits of chopped meat--offers the possibility
of a new and neglected sport, in effect the inversion of baiting a
school of fish. Toss a grasshopper into the air and he has only time
to spread his wings for a parachute to earth, when a bat swoops past
so quickly that the eyes refuse to see any single effort--but the
grasshopper has vanished. As for the piece of meat, it is drawn like
a magnet to the fierce little face. Once I tried the experiment of a
bit of blunted bent wire on a long piece of thread, and at the very
first cast I entangled a flutter-mouse and pulled him in. I was aghast
when I saw what I had captured. A body hardly as large as that of a
mouse was topped with the h