PURIFICATION. 
In the morning—not at the first blush of dawn, 
and 
but when the sun already mounts the horizon 
at the very moment when the cocoa-nut tree unfolds 
its leaves, the wrubus (or little vultures), perched in 
knots of forty or fifty upon its branches, open their 
brillant ruby eyes. The toils of the day demand 
them. In indolent Africa a hundred villages invoke 
them; in drowsy America, south of Panama or 
PN Z Caraccas, they, swiftest of cleansers, must sweep out 
my ly and purify the town before the Spaniard rises, before 
¢ the potent sun has stirred the carcass and the mass 
of rottenness into fermentation. If they failed a single day, the 
country would become a desert. 
When it is evening-time in America—when the urubu, his day’s 
work ended, replaces himself on the cocoa-nut tree—the minarets of 
