hill must be "Ye Umbrela
Tree."

Beneath the map were the directions for finding the treasure, written in
the angular hand of Nat Quinn. In order that you may understand I give
these just as he had written them.

HOW TO FIND ITTE:

From inlet nearest shore go 200 paces to summit where Grove is.
From most eastern palm measure 12 steps to Ye Umbrela Tree
and seven beyond. Take a Be line from here thirty paces throu
ye Forked Tree. Here cut a Rite Anggel N. N. E. till Tong of
Spit is lost. Cast three long steps Souwest to Big Rock and
dig on landward side.

(Sined)

Bully Evans X (His Mark)
Nat Quinn

While I had been poring over this map and the directions with it in my
office at San Francisco it had seemed an easy thing to follow them, but
in this dense, tropical jungle I found it quite another matter.

The vegetation and the underbrush were so rank that one found himself
buried before he had gone three steps in them.

No doubt at the time when the survivors of the _Mary Ann_ of Bristol had
cached their ill-gotten doubloons a recent fire had swept this point of
land so that they had found no difficulty in traversing it, but now the
jungle was so thick and matted that I decided to begin by cutting roads
to the palm grove and the umbrella tree.

From the yacht I got hatchets and machetes and we set to work. Before
night we all had a tremendous respect for the power of resistance
offered by a Panama jungle. We might almost as well have hacked at
rubber.

There was none of that sturdy solidity of our northern woods. The jungle
yields to every blow and springs back into place with a persistence that
seems devilish. By nightfall we had made so little progress that I was
discouraged.

To our right there was a mangrove swamp. As we passed its edge on the
way back to the boat our eyes beheld thousands upon thousands of birds
coming there to roost for the night. Among them were many aigrette
herons, white as the driven snow. I think I have never seen a bird so
striking as this one.

Blythe, with Neidlinger, Higgins, our engineers, and the other fireman,
took the second day on shore. Morgan was doing the cooking, and so was
exempt from service. Dugan, still weak from his wound, was helping in
the galley as best as he could.

All through the third day it rained hard, but on the fou