2l8 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS [May, '14 



alists or perhaps archeologists, or bibliophiles, for even the 

 collection of idols or old books has elements not to be despised. 



My net was always a letter of introduction, for there are 

 naturalists the world over. The first friend to be thus bagged 

 was a young engineer who was taking a job on the great 

 canal only because he wanted to make collections of tropical 

 beetles, and the last was an engineer coming home from 

 South America, the grandson of a celebrated nature writer, 

 and himself an ardent student of color photography. How 

 much these young men added to my going and coming with 

 tales of strange lands and distant peoples! And curiously, 

 the first person I met at the port was a woman, who had lived 

 for years in the little republic and who had an inexhaustible 

 fund of animal and plant lore. Then there were the others, 

 full of kindness to the lady "bug-catcher," but the most graci- 

 ous of all the friend who took me to her house and guarded 

 my time so that every moment might count for the bees or 

 bee notes of that wonderful tropical land. 



Once, however, I found myself suspected and arrested; my 

 net a badge of some strange foreign magic. 



We drove from Guatemala City to Antigua, and though it 

 is a scant thirty miles we were the most of the day on the 

 road. It was simply maddening to sit in the carriage and see 

 all sorts of new and wonderful plants growing by the road- 

 side, and every little while a great bee would crawl from its 

 nest in the bank by the road and add greatly to my unhappi- 

 ness. So when we started home I determined to walk ahead 

 of the carriage, and do some collecting. The carriage was 

 ordered for ten-thirty, and I planned to start at six if possible. 

 At five I went into the dining room hoping to get some 

 breakfast, but the funny waitress, a French negro ladrina, 

 declared there was no breakfast for an hour and held up her 

 brown finger to emphasize the information, but a man was 

 eating in the corner and I appealed to him as he spoke Eng- 

 lish. No, he said, it was not yet breakfast time; the bread had 

 not yet been brought in (it is usually baked by the Indians 

 and brought in by the basket load), and the milk was still at 



