im up; and, to my great amusement, he quietly leapt the whole,
descending five or six feet into a pool of mud, which shot out over
him and me, half blinding us for the moment; then slid away on his
haunches downward; picked himself up; and went on as usual, solemn,
patient, and seemingly stupid as any donkey.

We had some difficulty in finding our quest, the Salse, or mud-
volcano. But at last, out of a hut half buried in verdure on the
edge of a little clearing, there tumbled the quaintest little old
black man, cutlass in hand, and, without being asked, went on ahead
as our guide. Crook-backed, round-shouldered, his only dress a
ragged shirt and ragged pair of drawers, he had evidently thriven
upon the forest life for many a year. He did not walk nor run, but
tumbled along in front of us, his bare feet plashing from log to log
and mud-heap to mud-heap, his gray woolly head wagging right and
left, and his cutlass brushing almost instinctively at every bough
he passed, while he turned round every moment to jabber something,
usually in Creole French, which, of course, I could not understand.

He led us well, up and down, and at last over a flat of rich muddy
ground, full of huge trees, and of their roots likewise, where there
was no path at all. The solitude was awful; so was the darkness of
the shade; so was the stifling heat; and right glad we were when we
saw an opening in the trees, and the little man quickened his pace,
and stopped with an air of triumph not unmixed with awe on the edge
of a circular pool of mud and water some two or three acres in
extent.

'Dere de debbil's woodyard,' said he, with somewhat bated breath.
And no wonder; for a more doleful, uncanny, half-made spot I never
saw. The sad forest ringed it round with a green wall, feathered
down to the ugly mud, on which, partly perhaps from its saltness,
partly from the changeableness of the surface, no plant would grow,
save a few herbs and creepers which love the brackish water. Only
here and there an Echites had crawled out of the wood and lay along
the ground, its long shoots gay with large cream-coloured flowers
and pairs of glossy leaves; and on it, and on some dead brushwood,
grew a lovely little parasitic Orchis, an Oncidium, with tiny fans
of leaves, and flowers like swarms of yellow butterflies.

There was no track of man, not even a hunter's footprint; but
instead, tracks of beasts in plenty. Deer, qu