HOME AGAIN. 181 



baked soft, aud imbibed the sugar melted by the heat, and candied 

 in irregular shapes, like the interior of a crystallised rock hung 

 with brilliants. The steam was pendent from the sides in drops, 

 and a breath of sweets exhaled when opened that carried one's 

 mind back to the dinner-basket of childhood, and as each one of 

 the party possessed himself of a piece, and sat munching away, we 

 must have looked like so many monkeys in a melon patch. Poke 

 became poetical as usual and repeated Whittier's lines : 



"Oh fruit of loved boyhood! the old days recalling 



When wood grapes were purpling, and brown nuts were falling, 

 When wild ugly faces we carved in its skin 

 Glaring out through the dark, with a candle within." 



Jackson was disgusted with the rhyming. He never had lived 

 in a land where every corn-field was bright with pumpkins. 



An hour's rest and we were again on our course, Mike all the 

 while in the Indian's canoe, and leading the van. The wild fowl 

 were numerous along the river, though we did not stop to shoot, 

 partly because we were loaded with game, and partly because Mike 

 had requested us not, though he would give no reason, briefly say- 

 ing in reply to our questions, " It 's a leetle better to travel fast 

 and hunt slow, than to travel slow and hunt fast." Large flocks 

 of ducks were all the while being driven ahead of the boats, flying 

 short distances each time they got up. Flamingoes and cormorants 

 were winding from point to point, and knee-deep in the tide great 

 blue herons waded, and snow-white cranes dressed their plumage. 

 As vista after vista opened around the bends of the river, or up the 

 lateral lagoons, new forms and colours opened to the eye. There 

 the stately cypress-trees stood in the water, like the pillars of a 

 rustic Venice, and the mound-like cones their roots threw up 

 extended all across the basin ; while above, the swinging vine had 

 caught its tendrils in the opposite tree, and thus back and forth 

 festooned a royal portc-cochhe to the forest mansion. On the other 

 side a fallen tree shut in a passage and formed foothold for brier 

 and creeper, and vines that aspired to the highest pinnacles of the 

 forest and bowed the trees with their embrace. The lunge of the 

 alligator, the cry of the bittern as he rose from the reeds, the scream 

 of the fish-hawk, circling in the air and chasing the tern, seemed 



