CHAPTEK V. 



JACAMARS, PARROTS, AND TROGONS. 



Another exploring trip — Wild bananas and plantains — The little 

 bronze bird and his nest — The beautiful hill — Wing tipping a 

 parrot — A bird that showed fight. 



I HAD made several exciysions into the woods be- 

 fore I essayed an exploration of the stream that 

 flowed past my very door. Streams are the natural 

 highways of the aboriginal inhabitants of any land. 

 They fix their first residences near and on the coast ; 

 thence they make forays, and extend their knowledge 

 of the region by means of the streams and river val- 

 leys. Nowhere is this so prominent as in North 

 America, where for many years the great mountain 

 ranges shut the first settlers from Europe out of the 

 fertile territories beyond the AUeghanies and the 

 Rockies. 



When the Pilgrim Fathers came to the shore of 

 what they afterward named New England, they found 

 the coast Indians of one sort and the dwellers along 

 the Merrimac another. Different tribes lived in the 

 different river valleys, as the St. Lawrenr^e, the Con- 

 necticut, the Hudson, and the Ohio. The mountains 

 bounding the valleys also separated the dwellers there 



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