e creatures
which answer in the old world to the humming-birds of the new, with
their crests and gorgets of vivid scales.

"It's grand, it's wonderful," he muttered, with a sigh. "But I must get
on."

He forced his way through these openings, with the birds so tame that he
could easily have knocked them down with a stick, or caught them with a
butterfly-net. But leaving his collecting for a future time, he pressed
on, satisfied with the knowledge that he was in the midst of nature's
wonders, for the farther he progressed the more was he impressed with
the conviction that he and his companions had happened upon a place
which exceeded the most vivid paintings of his imagination, so rich did
it reveal itself in all they desired.

The progress he made was slower and slower, for he was nearly at the end
of his forces, and the matted-together tangle seemed in his weakness to
grow more dense. Where there was opening enough overhead he could see
that the sun was sinking rapidly, and he knew that it would be dark
almost directly it had disappeared.

"It is hopeless," he said to himself; "I shall never get out to-night;"
and with the idea forced upon him that he must be on the look-out for a
resting-place, or an opening where he could light a fire, and, if
possible, at the foot of some tree, in whose branches he could make
himself a shelter, he still toiled on.

This proved to be a less difficult task, for before long, as he crept
beneath the tangle of a climbing cane-like palm, he saw that it was more
light ahead, and in a few minutes he reached one of the natural
clearings, close to a huge short-trunked, many-branched fig. There was
dead wood in plenty, shelter, and fruit of two kinds close at hand,
while, greatest treasure of all, a tiny thread of water trickled among
some ancient, mossy fragments of volcanic rock, filling a little
basin-like pool with ample for his needs. To this he at once bowed his
head and drank with avidity, sublimely unconscious of the fact that a
tiny, slight, necklace-like snake was gliding over the moistened rock
just overhead, and that a pair of bright gem eyes were watching his
every motion from the great fig-tree, where its branches rose in a
cluster from the trunk.

"Hah!" sighed Oliver, as he rose from his long deep drink. "What a
paradise, but how awfully lonely!"

He noted then that the top of the mountain was in view, but apparently
no nearer; and setting to work he soon collect