thought I, "I can bear it; and the insects, they are what I have come in search of. What are the robbers to me, they will not find my present wardrobe worth cutting my throat for:" so leaving my two companions to their sedentary philosophy, and their siestas, which were sometimes taken by anticipation in the morning as well as afternoon—as soon as the weather became genial, I might be daily seen, after securing a breakfast, which, considering how doubtful the dinner was, was a very necessary precaution, stealing off up to the bluff, and among the fragile Indian huts. My accoutrement consisted of a good cudgel, a long sharp knife, the same that had operated upon the bisons, a few thousand entomological pins, a bag for seeds, and a broad-leaved palmetto sombrero.
That was certainly a species of intoxication! All was new, except the earth I trod upon—trees, shrubs, plants, insects, and birds. I gathered, examined, impaled. No flower courted my admiring gaze in vain. No insect hummed in my ear unattended to. If I skirted the riverside—there was the garrulous jackdaw with his mates quarrelling in their indescribable manner among the glossy leaves and innumerable stems of the mangroves; the white snow crane standing motionless in the shallow water, or a flight of vultures hovering over a dark corner, where my approach had scared them from a bloated carcass—not unfrequently a human one. Farther, the huge slimy log, half buried in the mud, crowded with terrapins; and the loathsome alligator squatting among the reeds on the shore. I would then follow one of those narrow winding paths cut in that thick dense shrubbery which covers a great portion of the surface of the country in the vicinity of Tampico—a wilderness of curious trees and thickets, matted and woven together with ten thousand creepers and parasitical plants, with their graceful hanging flowers, seed vessels—vines, passifloras, and splendid convolvuli rendered quite impervious by the thorny nature of the covert, and the rank growth of prickly aloes which form the undergrowth. These were the paradise of the par-
