sions, no mental palimpsest of resolving images. The spatial,
the temporal,--the hillside, the passing seconds,--the vibrations and
material atoms stimulating my five senses, all were tropical,
quickened with the unbelievable vitality of equatorial life. A
rustling came to my ears, although the breeze was still little more
than a sensation of coolness. Then a deep whirr sounded overhead, and
another, and another, and with a rush a dozen great toucans were all
about me. Monstrous beaks, parodies in pastels of unheard-of blues
and greens, breasts which glowed like mirrored suns,--orange overlaid
upon blinding yellow,--and at every flick of the tail a trenchant
flash of intense scarlet. All these colors set in frames of jet-black
plumage, and suddenly hurled through blue sky and green foliage, made
the hillside a brilliant moving kaleidoscope.

Some flew straight over, with several quick flaps, then a smooth
glide, flaps and glide. A few banked sharply at sight of me, and
wheeled to right or left. Others alighted and craned their necks in
suspicion; but all sooner or later disappeared eastward in the
direction of a mighty jungle tree just bursting into a myriad of
berries. They were sulphur-breasted toucans, and they were silent,
heralded only by the sound of their wings and the crash of their
pigments. I can think of no other assemblage of jungle creatures more
fitted to impress one with the prodigality of tropical nature. Four
years before, we set ourselves to work to discover the first eggs and
young of toucans, and after weeks of heartbreaking labor and
disappointments we succeeded. Out of the five species of toucans
living in this part of Guiana we found the nests of four, and the one
which eluded us was the big sulphur-breasted fellow. I remembered so
vividly the painstaking care with which, week after week, we and our
Indians tramped the jungle for miles,--through swamps and over rolling
hills,--at last having to admit failure; and now I sat and watched
thirty, forty, fifty of the splendid birds whirr past. As the last of
the fifty-four flew on to their feast of berries, I recalled with
difficulty my faded visions of northern birds.

And so ended, as in the great finale of a pyrotechnic display, my two
hours on a hillside clearing. I can neither enliven it with a
startling escape, nor add a thrill of danger, without using as many
"ifs" as would be needed to make a Jersey meadow untenable. For
example, _if_ I had f