r--one which, originally bright, becomes temporarily dim, and
finally attains to greater magnitude than before. Ultimately he became
a fixed ornament of our culinary and taxidermic cosmic system, and
whatever he did was accomplished with the most remarkable contortions
of limbs and body. To watch him rake was to learn new anatomical
possibilities; when he paddled, a surgeon would be moved to
astonishment; when he caught butterflies, a teacher of physical
culture would not have believed his eyes.

At night, when our servants had sealed themselves hermetically in
their room in the neighboring thatched quarters, and the last squeak
from our cots had passed out on its journey to the far distant goal of
all nocturnal sounds, we began to realize that our new home held many
more occupants than our three selves. Stealthy rustlings, indistinct
scrapings, and low murmurs kept us interested for as long as ten
minutes; and in the morning we would remember and wonder who our
fellow tenants could be. Some nights the bungalow seemed as full of
life as the tiny French homes labeled, "_Hommes 40: Chevaux 8_," when
the hastily estimated billeting possibilities were actually achieved,
and one wondered whether it were not better to be the _cheval
premier_, than the _homme quarantieme_.

For years the bungalow had stood in sun and rain unoccupied, with a
watchman and his wife, named Hope, who lived close by. The aptness of
his name was that of the little Barbadian mule-tram which creeps
through the coral-white streets, striving forever to divorce motion
from progress and bearing the name Alert. Hope had done his duty and
watched the bungalow. It was undoubtedly still there and nothing had
been taken from it; but he had received no orders as to accretions,
and so, to our infinite joy and entertainment, we found that in many
ways it was not only near jungle, it _was_ jungle. I have compared it
with a natural cave. It was also like a fallen jungle-log, and we some
of the small folk who shared its dark recesses with hosts of others.
Through the air, on wings of skin or feathers or tissue membrane;
crawling or leaping by night; burrowing underground; gnawing up
through the great supporting posts; swarming up the bamboos and along
the pliant curving stems to drop quietly on the shingled roof;--thus
had the jungle-life come past Hope's unseeing eyes and found the
bungalow worthy residence.

The bats were with us from first to last. We extermina