220 THE COCAL. 



would liave given tliem what tliey asked for liis skeleton; 

 but tlie Armadillo was cut up and hashed for ns, and was 

 eaten to the last scrap, being about the best game I ever 

 tasted. I fear he is a foul feeder at times, who by no means 

 confines himself to roots, or even worms. If what I was 

 told be true, there is but too much probability for Captain 

 Mayne Eeid's statement, that he will eat his way into the 

 soft parts of a dead horse, and stay there until he has eaten 

 his way out again. But, to do him justice, I never heard 

 him accused, like the giant Armadillo^ of the Main, of digging 

 dead bodies out of their graves, as he is doing in a very clever 

 drawing^ in Mr. Wood's " Homes w^ithout Hands." Be that 

 as it may, the Armadillo, whatever he feeds on, has the power 

 of transmuting it into most delicate and wholesome flesh. 



Meanwhile and hereby hangs a tale I was interested, 

 not merely in the Armadillo, but in the excellent taste with 

 which it, and everything else, was cooked, in a little open 

 shed over a few stones and firesticks. And complimenting 

 my host thereon, I found that he had, there in the primaeval 

 forest, an admirable French cook, to whom I begged to be 

 introduced at once. Poor fellow 1 A little lithe Parisian, not 

 thirty years old, he had got thither by a wild road. Cook 

 to some good bourgeois family in Paris, he had fallen in love 

 with his master's daughter, and she with him. And when 



^ Priodoiita gigas. 



