384 CAROLINA PARROT. 



board. The intermediate time between eating and sleeping 

 was occupied in gnawing the sticks that formed its place of 

 confinement, in order to make a practicable breach ; which 

 it repeatedly effected. When I abandoned the river, and 

 travelled by land, I wrapt it up closely in a silk handkerchief, 

 tying it tightly around, and carried it in my pocket. When 

 1 stopped for refreshment, I unbound my prisoner, and gave 

 it its allowance, which it generally despatched with great 

 dexterity, unhusking the seeds from the bur in a twinkling; 

 in doing which it always employed its left foot to hold the 

 bur, as did several others that I kept for some time. I began 

 to think that this might be peculiar to the whole tribe, and 

 that the whole were, if I may use the expression, left-footed ; 

 but, by shooting a number afterwards while engaged in eating 

 mulberries, I found sometimes the left, sometimes the right 

 foot stained with the fruit ; the other always clean ; from 

 which, and the constant practice of those I kept, it appears, 

 that, like the human species in the use of their hands, they 

 do not prefer one or the other indiscriminately, but are either 

 left or light-footed. But to return to my prisoner : In 

 recommitting it to "durance vile," we generally had a 

 quarrel ; during which it frequently paid me in kind for the 

 wound I had inflicted, and for depriving it of liberty, by 

 cutting and almost disabling several of my fingers with its 

 sharp and powerful bill. The path through the wilderness 

 between Nashville and Natchez is in some places bad beyond 

 description. There are dangerous creeks to swim, miles of 

 morass to struggle through, rendered almost as gloomy as 

 night by a prodigious growth of timber, and an underwood of 

 canes and evergreens ; while the descent into these sluggish 

 streams is often ten or fifteen feet perpendicular, into a bed of 

 deep clay. In some of the worst of these places, where I had, 

 as it were, to fight my way through, the paroquet frequently 

 escaped from my pocket, obliging me to dismount and pursue 

 it through the worst of the morass before I could regain it. 

 On these occasions, I was several times tempted to abandon 



