outs with their naked paddlers to swing into
sight round the bend through the white water, we talked of the
northern spring that was just beginning. He sells cream, eggs,
poultry, potatoes, honey, occasionally pork and veal; but at this
season it was the time for the maple sugar crop. He has a sugar
orchard, where he taps twelve hundred trees and hopes soon to tap as
many more in addition. Said Cherrie: "It's a busy time now for Fred
Rice"--Fred Rice is the hired man, and in sugar time the Cherrie boys
help him with enthusiasm, and, moreover, are paid with exact justice
for the work they do. There is much wild life about the farm, although
it is near Brattleboro. One night in early spring a bear left his
tracks near the sugar house; and now and then in summer Cherrie has
had to sleep in the garden to keep the deer away from the beans,
cabbages, and beets.

There was not much bird life in the forest, but Cherrie kept getting
species new to the collection. At this camp he shot an interesting
little ant-thrush. It was the size of a warbler, jet-black, with white
under-surfaces of the wings and tail, white on the tail-feathers, and
a large spot of white on the back, normally almost concealed, the
feathers on the back being long and fluffy. When he shot the bird, a
male, it was showing off before a dull-colored little bird, doubtless
the female; and the chief feature of the display was this white spot
on the back. The white feathers were raised and displayed so that the
spot flashed like the "chrysanthemum" on a prongbuck whose curiosity
has been aroused. In the gloom of the forest the bird was hard to see,
but the flashing of this patch of white feathers revealed it at once,
attracting immediate attention. It was an excellent example of a
coloration mark which served a purely advertising purpose; apparently
it was part of a courtship display. The bird was about thirty feet up
in the branches.

In the morning, just before leaving this camp, a tapir swam across
stream a little way above us; but unfortunately we could not get a
shot at it. An ample supply of tapir beef would have meant much to us.
We had started with fifty days' rations; but this by no means meant
full rations, in the sense of giving every man all he wanted to eat.
We had two meals a day, and were on rather short commons--both our
mess and the camaradas'--except when we got plenty of palm-tops. For
our mess we had the boxes chosen by Fiala, each containing a