e signal given by some great Jungle Spirit, who had tired
of playing with my dreams and pleasant fancies of northern life, and
now called upon her legions to disillusion me. And the response was
immediate. Three great shells burst at my very feet,--one of sound,
one of color, and the third of both plus numbers,--and from that time
on, tropical life was dominant whichever way I looked. That is the way
with the wilderness, and especially the tropical wilderness--to
surprise one in the very field with which one is most familiar. While
in my own estimation my chief profession is ignorance, yet I sign my
passport applications and my jury evasions as Ornithologist. And now
this playful Spirit of the Jungle permitted me to meditate cheerfully
on my ability to compare the faunas of New York and Guiana, and then
proceeded to startle me with three salvos of birds, first physically
and then emotionally.

From the monotone of under-world sounds a strange little rasping
detached itself, a reiterated, subdued scraping or picking. It carried
my mind instantly to the throbbing theme of the Niebelungs,
onomatopoetic of the little hammers forever busy in their underground
work. I circled a small bush at my side, and found that the sound came
from one of the branches near the top; so with my glasses I began a
systematic search. It was at this propitious moment, when I was
relaxed in every muscle, steeped in the quiet of this hillside, and
keen on discovering the beetle, that the first shell arrived. If I had
been less absorbed I might have heard some distant chattering or
calling, but this time it was as if a Spad had shut off its power,
volplaned, kept ahead of its own sound waves, and bombed me. All that
actually happened was that a band of little parrakeets flew down and
alighted nearby. When I discovered this, it seemed a disconcerting
anti-climax, just as one can make the bravest man who has been under
rifle-fire flinch by spinning a match swiftly past his ear.

I have heard this sound of parrakeet's wings, when the birds were
alighting nearby, half a dozen times; but after half a hundred I shall
duck just as spontaneously, and for a few seconds stand just as
immobile with astonishment. From a volcano I expect deep and sinister
sounds; when I watch great breakers I would marvel only if the
accompanying roar were absent; but on a calm sunny August day I do not
expect a noise which, for suddenness and startling character, can be
comp