erdict of any personal observer who has passed a few years in
the African or American tropics when I assert that these supposed
express-messengers of Death are not more venomous and are far less
aggressive than our common North American hornet. I doubt if the sting
of twenty tarantulas could cause the death of a healthy child, and I am
quite sure that a poison-ivy blister and the bite of a fire-ant are more
painful than the sting of a centipede. An hysterical lady may succumb
to the bite of a common gadfly, but I hold that only co-operative
insects--termites, wasps, bumble-bees, etc.--could ever make away with
a normally constituted human being.

A swarm of vociferous iris-crows appeared in the sky overhead, and
before they had passed, the woods were wide awake all around. The
humming-birds were on the wing, the wood-pigeons repeated their
murmuring call in the taxus-groves, and from the lower depths of the
forest came the chattering scream of a squirrel-monkey. The rising sun
was hidden by the tree-tops of the eastern valleys when we halted on the
summit of a rocky bluff, but the mountain mists had disappeared, and the
vistas on our left afforded a dazzling view of the sunlit foot-hills and
the valley of the Rio Verde. The river is here crossed by a rope-ferry a
little above its junction with a tributary that drains the glorious
valley of Morillo and an Alpine group whose wooded heights stand in my
memory like a vision of a Ganadesha, the mountain park of Indra's
Paradise.

The air of these woodlands is the antithesis of our Northern workshop
atmosphere. There is a feeling of delight--our lost sixth sense, I am
tempted to call it--which gratifies the lungs rather than the olfactory
organ if you inhale the morning breezes, oxidated, and perhaps
ozonized, by the first influence of sunlight on the aromatic vegetation
of these hills,--a delight which, like the charm of harmonious sounds,
reacts on the soul, and awakens emotions which have lain dormant in the
human breast since we exchanged the air of our Summer-land home for the
dust of our hyperborean tenement-prisons.

The hum of insects soon mingled with the bird-voices of our forest. To
and fro, in fitful flight, flashed the _libellas_, the glitter-winged
dragon-flies, and a few large papilios flopped lazily through the
dew-drenched foliage. No gnats up here, but thousands of tiny,
honey-seeking wasps and midges, and bright-winged grasshoppers that rose
with a flutt