ws, and a few moments afterwards the
sound was repeated.

Whatever animals they were who called, they were answering each other,
and certainly coming nearer.

The remembrance of the strange-looking face he had seen peering through
the leaves directly after the great nut had struck Wriggs, came back to
Oliver as he resumed his arduous journey, now finding the way easier
where the bigger trees grew, now more toilsome where there was an
opening caused by the fall of some forest monarch, which had rent a
passage for the sunshine, with the consequence that a dense mass of
lower growth had sprung up.

In these openings, in spite of heat and weariness, the young naturalist
forgot all his troubles for a few brief moments in his wonder and
delight, till the knowledge that he must push on roused him once more to
action. For there before him were in all their beauty the various
objects which he had come thousands of miles to seek. Beetles with wing
cases as of burnished metal crawled over leaves and clung to stems;
grotesque locust-like creatures sprang through the air, through which
darted birds which in their full vigour and perfect plumage looked a
hundred times more beautiful than the dried specimens to which he was
accustomed in museums and private collections. Here from a dry twig
darted a kingfisher of dazzling blue, not upon a fish, but upon a
beetle, which it bore off in triumph. Away overhead, with a roar like a
distant train, sped a couple of rhinoceros hornbills, to be succeeded by
a flash of noisy, harsh-shrieking paroquets, all gorgeous in green,
yellow, crimson and blue, ready to look wonderingly at the intruder upon
their domain, and then begin busily climbing and swinging among the
twigs of a bough, whose hidden fruit they hunted out from among the
leaves.

One tree close at hand was draped with a creeper of convolvulus-like
growth, hanging its trumpet-shaped flowers in every direction, ready for
a number of glittering gem-like birds to hover before them, and probe
the nectaries for honey or tiny insects, with their long curved bills.
So rapid in their movements were some of these, that their insect-like
buzzing flight was almost invisible to the watcher, till they hovered
before a blossom in the full sunshine, when their burnished, metallic
plumage, shot with purple, crimson, and gold, flashed in the sun's rays,
and literally dazzled the eye.

Oliver was in the home of the sun-birds, the brilliant littl