36 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
scene is brought back to him. Three bees and a 
fly winging their way past, with the rise and fall 
of their varied hums, were sufficient to renew 
vividly for me the blackness of night over the 
sticky mud of Souville, and to cloud for a mo- 
ment the scent of clover and dying grass, with 
that terrible sickly sweet odor of human flesh in 
an old shell-hole. In such unexpected ways do 
we link peace and war—suspending the greatest 
weights of memory, imagination, and visualiza- 
tion on the slenderest cobwebs of sound, odor, 
and color. 
But again my bees became but bees—great, 
jolly, busy yellow-and-black fellows, who blun- 
dered about and squeezed into blossoms many 
sizes too small for them. Cicadas tuned up, 
clearing their drum-heads, tightening their keys, 
and at last rousing into the full swing of their 
ecstatic theme. And my relaxed, uncritical mind 
at present recorded no difference between the 
sound and that which was vibrated from northern 
maples. The tamest bird about me was a big 
yellow-breasted white-throated flycatcher, and I 
had seen this Melancholy Tyrant, as his technical 
name describes him, in such distant lands that he 
fitted into the picture without effort. 
