the northern mountains of Trinidad to see a guacharo cave. The guacharo is an extraordinary bird, akin to our night-hawk or whippoorwill but the size of a barn-owl, which is nocturnal, lives gregariously in caves, and feeds exclusively on hard fruits, that is, on the nuts and seeds of palms. Humboldt visited the great guacharo cave in Venezuela over a century ago, and in Trinidad there are guacharo caves in the sea-cliffs which can be entered only when the water is calm. Hornaday once visited these seacaves; and both Chapman and Cherrie have since visited caves such as those which I visited. We motored out some thirty miles, to a point where the governor had most kindly arranged to have horses meet us. Then we rode four hours back among the mountains to a plantation belonging to Mr. Francis Leotand, who had courteously arranged that we should sleep in a room of the overseer's house. It was a lovely ride. We saw blue tanagers and heard the songs of thrushes and orioles. There were repeated showers, and we were drenched before we reached our destination, but between times the sun almost dried us, and the rain made the brilliant green woods fairly glisten. Most of the time we rode under the primeval tropic forest, with its incredible wealth of strange and noble forms of plant life. Cecropias grew on the newly cleared soil. Moras sent out buttresses. Here and there a giant vine had strangled some mighty tree. There was a wealth of ferns on the wet slopes. Orchids were numerous. Large blue butterflies and smaller red and black ones floated in the glades. In one part of the trail, although the sun was high, a bat flitted. Occasionally we passed clearings planted with banana-trees or cocoabushes, the excessively primitive house of the colored owner standing to one side. There were many different kinds of palms. One of the interesting trees or arborescent plants was akin to a wild pineapple. It holds water at the bases of the big, thick leaves, where they jut from the stem, and it is inhabited by a little fauna of its own, including a little frog and a lizard, and also, unhappily, a species of mosquito which Full of Paria VENE Z Tobago I. Port of Spain Orinoco R. 1 ATLANTIC O CE A N house of the overseer, a colored man. It stood on a hill in the midst of cocoa gardens and cocoanut groves. It was raised on stilts, with a piazza. One room, furnished with a table and benches, was given to us; in the other rooms dwelt the overseer and his family. A rough stable was near by, up a wet path; a couple of store-houses and two or three palmthatched cabins, where the barefooted workmen dwelt, were close at hand; the cooking was done with a pot and an earthen fireplace in a big shed, which was open at the sides. The boundaries here, as elsewhere generally in Trinidad, are marked by dracenas, which sometimes grow twice as high as a man's head. Their topmost leaves are red, and they are boldly decorative; the Spaniards named them the "flor réal," the royal flower. On our route that morning, at a turn in the trail through the forested mountain, we had passed a shrine on the ground, where around the crucifix was planted a half-square of dracænas. BRITI GU Georgetown Demerara H Kalacoon New Amsterdam British Guiana, showing location of the naturalists' tropical laboratory at Kalacoon. breeds in swarms. In places the road zigzagged up steep mountainsides. Elsewhere it crossed brooks. From one point we had a wonderful view out over a magnificent forest-filled valley, a sea of billowy green, sprayed here and there by the orange foam of the immortelle-trees. Twice we came on high hillsides where there were bell-birds. These are not the true bell-bird of the mainland forests, which is snow-white with a voice like the tolling of a bell. They are dull-colored, with curious wattles on the throat, and their voices, although loud, are not musical. They perched in the tops of the tall trees, and sat almost motionless. Twice I saw one in the bare top of a dead tree, and watched it through my single-barrelled pocket-glass. The birds were very noisy, continually uttering their harsh, explosive call; in giving this call the neck was stretched straight out and the head thrown upward. Early in the afternoon we reached the After lunch we went to see the guacharos. We followed a stream through cocoa plantations for half a mile, until we came to where it flowed out of a limestone cliff from a cave which was the guacharo home. Thick forest grew along and over the crumbling front of the cliff; and vines and creepers and wet rockplants overhung the edges of the cave, partially obscuring it, while water-loving plants grew in front, some with enormous leaves. At the entrance, near which there lay large boulders, the irregular opening was perhaps fifteen feet across and rather higher. Out of it rushed the stream, here knee-deep, and covering the whole bottom. With torches we entered the cave. It of the nests grew many fungi, slender was hard walking, for the clear stream slid over sand, pebbles, and ragged-edged boulders, and might at one moment be ankle-deep and the next reach almost to our waists. The cave twisted, and we speedily passed out of the pleasant halflight of the entrance into obscurity. Immediately we began to hear the birds, and dimly to make them out flapping and fluttering above us. They uttered loud, growling cries, and also a continuous metallic clacking, and the naked young birds in the nests piped and wailed. It was all very weird, and I did not wonder that the superstitious black peasantry, who believe the woods and waters to be thronged with jumbies, should have christened these birds "diablotins" (the name once given in Martinique to nocturnal petrels which burrowed in the mountains). They will not enter the cave on Good Friday and, although they plunder the nests of the incredibly fat and oily young birds, which are used to eat and also to make oil out of, they regard the place as uncanny. But the birds are merely comic devilkins, poor creatures, are as harmless as they are curious, and should be carefully protected. The cave must have been occupied for untold centuries, and the ledges and recesses in the sides, and the slabs of rock which were raised above the level of the water-in fact, every portion which was neither too steep nor water-sweptwas covered inches deep, in some places a foot or two deep, with guano. The nests themselves, of which we soon began to see many, were on the ledges and in the crannies and holes; and when we were quiet the birds soon began to settle on them. They were made of the guano, being cup-shaped, with thick, raised walls. Some contained two to four short, pearshaped eggs, white, but stained with the guano; others contained very fat, naked young. We saw the old birds brooding, sometimes one, sometimes both parents sitting side by side. They crouch like a whippoorwill or night-hawk; they do not perch erect, in the posture in which some museum specimens are mounted. We did not desire specimens and molested nothing. A singular thing was that in the guano things like reed-stalks, sometimes only an inch or two long, sometimes a foot or eighteen inches. They also grew elsewhere in the guano, and in places had matted it into a kind of peaty consistency. It seemed extraordinary that they could grow without any sunlight. There was a good deal of life in the place aside from the birds. There were many bats. Beside the water at one spot we found a toad the size of a bullfrog. Insects swarmed, including crickets, earwigs, and moths. Everywhere through the guano were the seeds and nuts of various species of palms; among the commonest were nuts nearly the size of betel-nuts. Some of these nuts were from kinds of palm which did not grow within ten or fifteen miles. The birds emerge from the cavern after nightfall, occasionally uttering their growling cries, and fly for long distances to their feeding-places, sometimes hovering in the air as they pluck the nuts, seeds, or fruits. Whether they also sometimes alight while they pluck them I do not know. They feed their young by regurgitation and live in the caves all the year round. We went on and on, wading, clambering over the rocks, slipping and plunging in the darkness. At last, where the roof was still high, but getting lower, we put out the torches. There did not seem to be a ray of light, but this portion of the cave was still filled with the birds, which were flapping overhead and uttering their extraordinary noises; and when we relighted the torches we saw many of them on their nests. Farther in, however, where the roof became lower, only bats dwelt. Then we halted, waded and clambered back to the entrance, and left the excited devilkins growling, croaking, and clacking behind us. It was late in the afternoon and we returned to the house. We dried our clothes as well as we could, but it was moist and rainy and they were still wet when we put them on next morning. We dined well on what we had brought with us. My companions had hammocks; I slept soundly on the table. Next morning the sunrise was glorious; the day was clear and bright and the ride homeward was pure pleasure. ONE AFTERNOON By Harriet V. C. Ogden ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES HUARD a beginning to the afternoon, our unfamiliarity with the workings of French apartment-houses made us blunder, my sister and me, into the midst of an astonished French family. They were very polite about it; Mme. La Baronne bade us a charming welcome; her husband threw away his cigarette and drew chairs for us into their circle. The only hint they gave that, failing to find the concierge in the courtyard below, we should have rung a bell there, was that they told us it existed. But they were evidently very much surprised to have us drop in on them in that way with no more announcement than our names spoken at the opening door. The Twins, whom we had come to fetch, put on their wraps with a haste that suggested our presence must be disturbing to their parents. On the way down-stairs again they rallied us on our ignorance and admired my sister's hat. It was old and it was shapeless; the one point in its favor was that it defied the wind. But its very age, it seems, was what attracted the Twins. "Americans," they explained, "always look as though they had on perfectly new clothes. It's a pleasure to find one who does not mind sometimes being seen in an old hat." Were they sarcastic, or are we really as bad as that? The Twins were outwardly very much alike oval cheeks, lustrous dark hair, and long-lashed brown eyes-but from the first I had no difficulty in telling them apart. Their character shone through their faces like different-colored light through identical shades. Anne painted fans as beautifully as old miniatures are painted; Alice worked at the Croix Rouge every morning-it was before the warand in the afternoon she was too tired to be other than quiet and silent. Neither of them hunted, as the rest of us did, "because they had no 'chaperon.' The whole field of riders did not suffice if there was none among them to whom the Twins could refer as "their chaperon." As we turned out of the courtyard they asked us, with a little hint of shyness in the question, if we would like to go see their home. "Oh, no, that was not home, that little apartment we had just left-home was quite different." And as we sped along the smooth white road by the river bank they told us about it and why they did not live there any more. Home was not home any more because they were poor. Home was all they had had, or nearly all, and so-it seemed very simple to them-when the brother married he had got it as a dot. A man must have a dot as well as a girl if he is to make a good match. He had married a rich wife and so all was well. That there was no dot left for the Twins was a secondary consideration, since they could not carry on the name. Unfortunately, the rich belle-sœur did not like "home" and would not live there. The brother was stationed with his regiment in a garrison town a few miles away. We passed some of the officers' glossyflanked horses out for exercise, and I wondered whether they, perhaps, constituted another reason why the Twins did not hunt. As there was no dot left for them when the brother was supplied, might there not also be no horse? It is more obvious that one cannot hunt without a hunter than without a chaperon. We passed by the door of a great cathedral in their "home" town, and when we admired it it was as though we had praised some one near and dear to them. Anne's face glowed with pleasure. But her eyes grew soft with a suggestion of tears as she spoke of the hours she had spent playing the organ in "her Cathedral." Their ancestors were buried there, and it was part and parcel of "home" to them. But we had been there before, and the Château, which we had only seen through the trees in passing on the road, interested us more that day, so we went on without stopping. We turned in at a gate by an old stone house. One wing, it was, of what had been the Château before it was destroyed in some war or other. It was used as a farmhouse now, but, though it looked very humble, they spoke of it reverently as the birthplace of their family, from which their name was derived. The avenue ran straight in across level fields to a little hill on which the house stood. I am not sure whether it was a natural hill or an artificial one built by the Romans before they fortified it, as they did very strongly. The old stone walls of their fortifications were still standing in several places, and their road, running round and round the hill in ascending spirals, was still intact. It was used as a pleasure walk. The modern avenue had been cut right into the side of the hill like a miniature ravine, running straight and steep from its base to its summit. We stopped at its mouth and looked up at the five bridges, one above the other, which marked the course of the Roman road. There was a level plateau on the top of the hill on which huge trees grew and threw their shadows on the smooth lawn around them. The Château itself stood white and stately on one side of it, close by the Roman wall. It looked down from its height on the flat plains of its dependent farms. But now it seemed asleep with its closed and shuttered windows. As we stopped before the door a magnificent white dog bounded out from some back part of the house and threw himself on the Twins with wild barks of delight. He was taller than they when he stood on his hind legs, and he nearly knocked them over in leaping up and trying to lick their faces. Inside, the house echoed our footsteps drearily, as empty houses do, but it was beautiful and looked as though it would be comfortable to live in. We must see it all, the Twins said, from gallery to bedroom, but first of all we must see the Chapel. They hushed their voices as they opened the little door under the staircase and knelt for a moment before the tiny Altar. Their eyes were a little moist when they rose again and opened the drawers in the toy-like sacristy to show us the altar linen and hangings. Some of them were marvels of fine needlework, all done by the ladies of the house from one generation to another, the Twins' own work by no means put to shame by that of their ancestors. These things had been their care, they said, and to keep fresh flowers on the Altar. They had been very fond of it. I took a prejudice against the rich belle-sœur who did not like it and would not live there. In the gallery they told us anecdotes of the painted ladies and the painted soldiers-how one had died in such a war, another fought in such a battle, and lived to tell of it. Their favorite had fought in the Napoleonic Wars, but there were others with stories much more fascinating to me. Then we went out again on to the terrace. We walked around the old Roman walls and down the first spiral of their road. Across the sluggish river, with its blue waters broken here and there by sandbars, the snow-capped mountains lost themselves in the distance, melting into the pale sky. In the foreground the fertile fields lay at our feet, with here and there a low, vine-thatched, whitewashed cottage. Looking out across the meadows, Anne pointed to a flourishing crop of wheat. "That," she said, "is le tapis romain." "The what?" "Le tapis romain," she repeated. The two languages were indifferent to us all four, and all afternoon we had spoken French and English as they happened to come to our lips. But now my sister asked for a translation. "A ‘tapis,' in English," she said, "is a carpet, and that out there is a wheat-field." The Twins laughed at us. "Yes, but it's a Roman carpet, too," they explained. "Under the wheat, buried some four feet deep, lies the mosaic floor of a Roman palace. We think the governor of the |