through British or Dutch Guiana, would be reached; and so on,
and on, by slow or swift stages, with little to eat perhaps, with much
labour and pain, in hot sun and in storm, to the Atlantic at last, and
towns inhabited by Christian men.

In the evening of that day, after completing my preparations, I supped
on the remaining portions of the sloth, not suitable for preservation,
roasting bits of fat on the coals and boiling the head and bones into a
broth; and after swallowing the liquid I crunched the bones and sucked
the marrow, feeding like some hungry carnivorous animal.

Glancing at the fragments scattered on the floor, I remembered old
Nuflo, and how I had surprised him at his feast of rank coatimundi in
his secret retreat. "Nuflo, old neighbour," said I, "how quiet you are
under your green coverlet, spangled just now with yellow flowers! It
is no sham sleep, old man, I know. If any suspicion of these curious
doings, this feast of flesh on a spot once sacred, could flit like a
small moth into your mouldy hollow skull you would soon thrust out your
old nose to sniff the savour of roasting fat once more."

There was in me at that moment an inclination to laughter; it came
to nothing, but affected me strangely, like an impulse I had not
experienced since boyhood--familiar, yet novel. After the good-night to
my neighbour, I tumbled into my straw and slept soundly, animal-like. No
fancies and phantoms that night: the lidless, white, implacable eyes
of the serpent's severed head were turned to dust at last; no sudden
dream-glare lighted up old Cla-cla's wrinkled dead face and white,
blood-dabbled locks; old Nuflo stayed beneath his green coverlet; nor
did my mournful spirit-bride come to me to make my heart faint at the
thought of immortality.

But when morning dawned again, it was bitter to rise up and go away for
ever from that spot where I had often talked with Rima--the true and
the visionary. The sky was cloudless and the forest wet as if rain had
fallen; it was only a heavy dew, and it made the foliage look pale and
hoary in the early light. And the light grew, and a whispering wind
sprung as I walked through the wood; and the fast-evaporating moisture
was like a bloom on the feathery fronds and grass and rank herbage; but
on the higher foliage it was like a faint iridescent mist--a glory above
the trees. The everlasting beauty and freshness of nature was over all
again, as I had so often seen it with joy and a