i 5 6 THE ADVENTURES OF A NATURE GUIDE 



underbrush. It was voted to send out a likely 

 boy and girl to discover how many hundred miles 

 it was through the forest. While waiting we de- 

 cided to examine one of the brooks, which someone 

 called the Amazon River. We found a delta which 

 one boy insisted was the delta at the mouth of the 

 Mississippi. No one objected and we had discus- 

 sions concerning deltas, large and small. But the 

 vast wilderness between our two brooks — which 

 contained really about one acre — was reported by 

 our two scouts as altogether too large for us ever 

 to explore. 



Someone then proposed we should cross the 

 brook on a fallen log to see who the strange people 

 were in the wilderness on the other side. The last 

 boy of the party made a long jump from the end 

 of the log and declared he had jumped across a 

 nation — that one boundary line was the end of the 

 log and the other was where he alighted. Just 

 where the remaining two lines should be provoked 

 a profound discussion, as boundary lines of nations 

 often do. It was finally agreed that the other 

 lines should be determined by one of the girls tak- 

 ing a hop, skip, and jump. 



We decided to take a census and at once every- 

 one began to count the inhabitants of this nation. 

 We found a number of bugs, spiders, and beetles; 

 then other beetles and a few grasshoppers; and 

 finally everyone surrounded a swarming ant hill, 

 trying to determine how to make an accurate count 



