38 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 
against that wonderful background of tropical leaves, 
with its depths of shade and gleams of light, with the 
water dashing against the rock upon which she stood, 
and parting in sheets of foam, what a charming naiad 
she appeared! Naiad she may have been, but she could 
hardly have been called a Dry-ad, as the water had 
caused her garment to cling closely to her shapely 
figure, and was pouring from it. 
Once, breathless and excited, she arose, and came 
to me with an ugly water scorpion between her fingers, 
one of which was red and swollen, where the venom- 
ous thing had bitten it. Thus we went on up the 
stream until near the mountain lake, when our way was 
stopped by a jam of broken limbs. Then we turned 
down again until halted by a series of wells, worn from 
the rock by the action of the water, twenty feet deep, 
into which the flood plunged wildly, ever descending, 
on its way to the grand leap of two hundred feet into 
the valley below. While my companions searched a 
side stream I remained on the banks by the trail. 
Daylight waned and they came not; the gathering 
gloom urged me to be up and on my way home; but 
the trail was obscured, and I was not sure of reaching 
my hut in the dark without a guide. So I waited, 
perforce. Everything living seemed to have left the 
river’s banks, and the only companion to my solitude 
was a gayly-colored lizard, which lay upon a branch 
and watched me. In the interest of science — but 
against my better feelings —I held a bottle before his 
nose, and he walked into it. Then I put in the cork, 
and later he was having his fill of rum; not the first 
victim of the bottle — and of science. 
Voices reached me not long after, and none too 
