MY COMPANIONS 3 



museum, who wrote me that the museum would be 

 pleased to send under me a couple of naturalists, whom, 

 with my approval. Chapman would choose. 



The men whom Chapman recommended were Messrs. 

 George K. Cherrie and Leo E. Miller. I gladly ac- 

 cepted both. The former was to attend chiefly to the 

 ornithology, and the latter to the mammalogy, of the 

 expedition ; but each was to help out the other. No 

 two better men for such a trip could have been found. 

 Both were veterans of the tropical American forests. 

 Miller was a young man, born in Indiana, an enthusiastic 

 naturalist with good hterary as well as scientific training. 

 He was at the time in the Guiana forests, and joined us 

 at Barbados. Cherrie was an older man, born in Iowa, 

 but now a farmer in Vermont. He had a wife and six 

 children. Mrs. Cherrie had accompanied him during 

 two or three years of their early married life in his 

 collecting trips along the Orinoco. Their second child 

 was bom when they were in camp a couple of hundred 

 miles from any white man or woman. One night a few 

 weeks later they were obliged to leave a camping-place, 

 where they had intended to spend the night, because 

 the baby was fretful, and its cries attracted a jaguar, 

 which prowled nearer and nearer in the twilight until 

 they thought it safest once more to put out into the 

 open river and seek a new resting-place. Cherrie had 

 spent about twenty-two years collecting in the American 

 tropics. Like most of the field-naturalists I have met, 

 he was an unusually efficient and fearless man ; and 

 willy-nilly he had been forced at times to vary his career 

 by taking part in insurrections. Twice he had been 

 behind the bars in consequence, on one occasion spend- 

 ing three months in a prison of a certain South American 

 state, expecting each day to be taken out and shot. In 



