PEEILOUS ADVENTURE. 
405 
crack of their fowling-pieces to ascertain each other’s 
whereabout. When they had finished their day’s 
sport, the descending sun was already struggling 
through the lengthening shadows on the river. The 
friends assembled where they had parted in the 
morning, but the Spanish priest had not yet come 
in. No one had heard his gun from the time they 
had separated. They sought him through the dark- 
ening thickets, and along the stream, and found him 
at last, fast seated in a tree, into which he had been 
obliged to betake himself to escape an Alligator 
that had pursued him by a succession of leaps. 
It had run in pursuit of him, as he said, jumping 
rapidly after him, with its back crooked, like a 
frightened cat. He had sprung to the branches, and 
gained their security out of the reach of the reptile, 
who for a long time after he had got into the tree, 
crouched in a thicket close by, where it quietly 
watched and waited his descent from his retreat. I 
was not aware, until after I had heard this relation, 
that Humboldt had similarly described the attack of 
the crocodile when pursuing its victim on land. 
When Moreau de St. Mery, about 1790, col- 
lected materials for his work on St. Domingo, he 
noticed a Cayman that had been kept for ten years 
on a plantation at Gonaives, not far from the Ester, 
called Cockerel. When it was first taken, it was 
only eighteen inches long ; but at the time he wrote 
it had grown to the dimensions of seven feet. This 
may serve to give one some idea of the progressive 
growth of this reptile. He mentions that it was 
kept in a sort of inclosure into which no other water 
