266 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 
wrestled with it. In town, seven miles distant, the 
temperature was ten degrees hotter than here on the 
mountain-top, ranging from eighty to ninety. The 
sudden change in temperature chilled me; the eleva- 
tion depressed me. There were hooks for hammocks, 
and an iron bedstead, but no mattresses; the hooks 
were high up, and my hammock (a netted “Ashan- 
tee”) from long use now bulged like a pudding-bag, 
consequently I was doubled up all night, neck to heels. 
The lake, elliptical in outline, two thousand feet 
above the sea, is in full view from the house. A 
range of mountains encloses all — two craters, and the 
dividing ridge on which the house is built. An inner 
circle of hills, clothed in tropical trees, rises around 
the lake, forming the basin. 
The man in charge of the house, its sole occupant, 
had a number of traps, or dead-falls, set in the forest 
beyond the lake, for the agouti and armadillo. These 
two animals, with the monkeys, are about the only 
forest quadrupeds larger than an opossum remaining 
in these islands. At the time of their discovery, the 
Lesser Antilles possessed several species now exter- 
minated. The most interesting was a small animal 
like a dog, found by the Spaniards among the Indians 
of Haiti, a native of the New World, called by them 
the “alco.” In St. Domingo there were no other dogs. 
It was a shy, gentle creature, and perfectly mute, and 
was as much beloved by the Indians as their children, 
being carried by them in their arms wherever they 
went. It is now extinct. The peccary, or “ Mexican 
musk-hog,” once abundant in these islands, has been 
exterminated from all but Tobago; the hogs of Do- 
minica and St. Vincent being the domestic species 
