A YARD OF JUNGLE 255 



or betes rouges, whose hosts had done all in their 

 power to make life in the jungle unhappy. 



Day by day my vials increased. Scores of 

 creatures evaded my search; many others, of 

 whose kind I had captured a generous number, 

 I allowed to escape. 



My lilliputian census was far from the mere 

 aggregation of ants and worms which I had an- 

 ticipated, and a review of the whole showed 

 that hardly any great group of living creatures 

 was unrepresented. 



As hinting of the presence of wild animals, a 

 bunch of rufous hairs had in some way been 

 tweaked from a passing agouti. Man himself 

 was represented in the shape of two wads which 

 had dropped from my gun-shots some time dur- 

 ing the week. One had already begun to dis- 

 integrate and sheltered half a dozen diminutive 

 creatures. Five feathers were the indications of 

 birds, two of which were brilliant green plumes 

 from a calliste. Of reptiles there was a broken 

 skull of some lizard, long since dead, and the 

 eggshell of a lizardling which had hatched and 

 gone forth upon his mission into the jungle. 

 A third reptilian trace may have been his neme- 

 sis — a bit of shed snake-skin. The group of 



