124 TlMEHRI. 
remembered perhaps better than any one else now living; 
and, at any rate, he could, and did always with the greatest 
delight, tell of them better than any one now living. He 
was during his last years, as it were, a sort of loving, 
unofficial, warden of the river, with, as it seemed, first 
rights — rights which he was always pleased to exercise — 
of guiding strangers along its banks and, by his endless 
flow of apposite story, repeopling in the imagination of 
his hearers its now almost deserted and abandoned 
forests and savannahs. 
Yes : it is as a pleasant and genial guide to, and warden 
of, the Berbice River that Alexander Winter should 
be remembered, and that, I fancv, he will be long and 
very kindly remembered by the few impoverished des- 
cendants of its old settlers, who still inhabit its banks. A 
part, unfortunately but a small part, of this river-lore of 
his he had already recorded in the pages of Timehri ; 
the rest is lost, alas, for ever. It may truly be said of 
him that he was the last survivor of a very distinct and 
unprosaic phase in the life history of Guiana. 
But he had a mind for other interests beside those of 
the river. He was, in fa6l J curiously ready, even to the 
last, to interest himself in any new study that was 
brought before him. I myself can bear witness how when, 
not three years ago, I brought the subject of my own 
hobby, of stone implements, before him, he at once 
set to work to colle6l specimens, and to gather informa- 
tion on the subject, with all the energy of a schoolboy 
and all the intelligence of a man in his prime. 
Plants, too, he had ever made a favourite study ; and 
it may be worth noting that, as regards these, he had a 
curious and rare, but laudable preference for their exact 
