hem that I have
seen and killed a boa-constrictor nearly eighteen metres in length,
they will laugh and call me a man with a bad tongue."

Whereupon my friend, the chief, rose to his full height and exclaimed
in a grieved tone: "Sir, you say that your people in the north will
not believe that we have snakes like this or even larger. That is
an insult to Brazilians, yet you tell us that in your town Nova York
there are _barracaos_ that have thirty-five or even forty stories on
top of each other! How do you expect us to believe such an improbable
tale as that?"

I was in a sad plight between two realities of such mighty proportions
that they could be disbelieved in localities far removed from each
other.

We brought the skin to headquarters, where I prepared it with arsenical
soap and boxed it for later shipment to New York. The skin measured,
when dried, 54 feet 8 inches, with a width of 5 feet 1 inch.

Kind reader, if you have grown weary of my accounts of the reptilian
life of the Amazon, forgive me, but such an important role does this
life play in the every-day experience of the brave rubber-workers
that the descriptions could not be omitted. A story of life in the
Amazon jungle without them would be a deficient one, indeed.

There is a bird in the forests, before referred to, called by the
Indians "_A mae da lua_," or the "Mother of the Moon." It is an owl and
makes its habitation in the large, dead, hollow trees in the depths
of the jungle, far away from the river front, and it will fly out of
its nest only on still, moonlit nights, to pour forth its desolate and
melancholy song. This consists of four notes uttered in a major key,
then a short pause lasting but a few seconds, followed by another
four notes in the corresponding minor key. After a little while the
last two notes in the minor key will be heard and then all is still.

When the lonely wanderer on the river in a canoe, or sitting in his
hammock, philosophises over the perplexing questions of life, he is
assisted in his dreary analysis by the gloomy and hair-raising cry
of the mother of the moon. When the first four notes strike his ear,
he will listen, thinking that some human being in dire distress is
somewhere out in the swamps, pitifully calling for help, but in so
painful a manner that it seems as if all hope were abandoned. Still
listening, he will hear the four succeeding melancholy notes,
sounding as if the desolate sufferer were giving u