ation, while he walks along.

But a truce to digressive explanation. Let us follow him.

Reaching the banks of the river, he stops, and, standing in an attitude
worthy of Apollo, though he is not aware that we are looking at him,
gazes first up the stream and then down. This done, he looks across,
after which he tries to penetrate the depths of the water with his eye.

As no visible result follows, he wisely gives up staring and wishing,
and apparently resolves to attain his ends by action. Felling a small
tree, about as thick as his thigh, with an iron hatchet he cuts off it a
length of about six feet. Into one end of this he drives a
sharp-pointed hard-wood spike, several inches long, and to the other end
attaches a stout rope made of the fibrous husk of the cocoa-nut. The
point of the spike he appears to anoint--probably a charm of some
kind,--and then suspends the curious instrument over a forked stick at a
considerable height from the ground, to which he fastens the other end
of the rope. This done, he walks quietly away with an air of as much
self-satisfaction as if he had just performed a generous deed.

Well, is that all? Nay, if that were all we should owe you a humble
apology. Our chief, "savage" though he be, is not insane. He _has_ an
object in view--which is more than can be said of everybody.

He has not been long gone, an hour or two, when the smooth surface of
the river is broken in several places, and out burst two or three heads
of hippopotami. Although, according to Disco Lillihammer, the
personification of ugliness, these creatures do not the less enjoy their
existence. They roll about in the stream like puncheons, dive under one
another playfully, sending huge waves to the banks on either side. They
gape hideously with their tremendous jaws, which look as though they had
been split much too far back in the head by a rude hatchet--the tops of
all the teeth having apparently been lopped off by the same clumsy blow.
They laugh too, with a demoniacal "Ha! ha! ha!" as if they rejoiced in
their excessive plainness, and knew that we--you and I, reader--are
regarding them with disgust, not unmingled with awe.

Presently one of the herd betakes himself to the land. He is tired of
play, and means to feed. Grass appears to be his only food, and to
procure this he must needs go back from the river a short way, his
enormous lips, like an animated mowing-machine, cutting a track of short
croppe