BIRD STORIES 



Besides the groves where the nuts and fruit and flow- 

 ers grew^ the vagabonds passed over forests so dense and 

 tangled that Bob caught never a ghmpse of the monkeys 

 playing there: big brown ones, with heads of hair that 

 looked like wigs, and tiny white ones, timid and gentle, 

 and other kinds, too, all of them being very wise in their 

 wild ways — as wise, perhaps, as a hand-organ monkey, 

 and much, much happier. 



No, I don't think Bob saw^ the monkeys, but lie must 

 have caught glimpses of some members of the Parrot 

 Family, for there w^ere so many of them ; and I 'm sure he 

 heard the racket they made when they talked together. 

 One kind had feathers soft as the blue of a pale hyacinth 

 flower, and a beak strong enough to crush nuts so hard- 

 shelled that a man could not easily crack them with a 

 hammer. But all that was as nothing to Bob. For 't was 

 not grove or forest or beast or bird that the vagabonds 

 were seeking. 



When they had crossed the Amazon River, some of the 

 band stopped in places that seemed inviting. But Bob 

 and the rest of the company w^ent on till they crossed the 

 Paraguay River; and there, in the western part of that 

 country, they made themselves at home. A strange, 

 topsy-turvy land it is — as queer in some ways as the 

 Wonderland Alice entered when she wxnt through the 

 Looking-Glass; for in Paraguay January comes in the 



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