THE MONKE Y FAMIL Y. 181 



their repast. If I had fired amongst them, some dozens must have 

 fallen ; so, to save a cruel and a useless slaughter, I contented 

 myself with remaining a harmless spectator of the ornithological 

 banquet. I am sure that I acted rightly. Once more, I wish to 

 draw the attention of the reader to those ever-fruitful forests of the 

 torrid zone. I would sometimes say to myself as I was roving 

 through them, that if a man could climb like a monkey, and feel 

 as safe and as much at his ease as monkeys are in them, he might 

 amuse himself amongst them from month to month, and from year 

 to year, without any fear of a deficiency of trees to arrest his journey 

 onwards, and force him to the ground again so dense is the foliage, 

 and so interwoven are the branches. Indeed, the traveller who con- 

 templates the altitude of these trees, cannot but form an indifferent 

 opinion of those in his own woods at home. These are merely 

 dwarfs, whilst those in the wilds of Guiana appear like mighty 

 giants. One could fancy that they had been trained originally by 

 the hand of Omnipotence itself to ornament the grounds of Paradise 

 for Adam. Never can I forget, to my dying day, the impression 

 which the contemplation of them made upon my mind a mind, I 

 may say, serene amidst nature's pristine beauties, after having left 

 behind it the chequered joys and sorrows of a dull existence in its 

 native land. Many a time whilst roving onwards I would strike a 

 light through mere wanton amusement, and apply a martch to some 

 hollow tree before me ; the enormous trunk of which might have 

 aptly been denominated the chimney at the furnace of old Poly- 

 phemus, the Cyclop. My young readers will learn, in the course of 

 their studies, that this notorious giant lost his only eye, which was 

 like a huge shield in the middle of his forehead, by having had it 

 scooped out through the application of a red hot pine-sapling. As 

 there was no owner to this endless woodland empire, nor any lawyer 

 of course studiously at work to point out the exact bearing of those 

 well-known words " meum and ttmm? I considered it all my own by 

 right of discovery. The flame, rapidly ascending, roared through the 

 enormous arboreal tunnel, and the dense columns of black smoke, 

 as they got vent at the top of it, started dozens of bats which were 

 slumbering there in peace and quiet, heedless of approaching danger. 

 But neither in this, nor in any others, which I pried into from time 



