88 CORA SHEAR-TAIL HUMMIXG-BIRD. 



A couple more strips are fixed over the 

 chasm, and made to serve as a bahistrade; 

 and on this frail support the traveller has 

 to venture his life, the bridge swaying with 

 an unsteady motion at every step. 



And more dangerous still is another 

 bridge, made of a mere rope stretched from 

 side to side, or bank to bank. A rough 

 kind of chair is fastened to the rope, and 

 in it the traveller seats himself, and is 

 pulled slowly across by another rope at- 

 tached to the chair, and in the hands of 

 some one on the opposite bank. 



The wild table-lands of Peru are called 

 ^' the uninhabited." But Nature contrives 

 a scanty kind of pasture. In some places 

 are patches of the gentian, a true moun- 

 tain-flower ; and here is the verbena, and 

 the ornament of our English gardens, the 

 calceolaria. And here are a few dwarfed- 

 looking shrubs that the inhabitants of this 



