wers and vines and trees with French
names that bring back the scene to me even now with a whiff of romance,
bois d'arc, lilac, grande volaille (water-lily). Birds flew hither and
thither (the names of every one of which Xavier knew),--the whistling
papabot, the mournful bittern (garde-soleil), and the night-heron
(grosbeck), who stood like a sentinel on the points.

One night I awoke with the sweat starting from my brow, trying to collect
my senses, and I lay on my blanket listening to such plaintive and
heart-rending cries as I had never known. Human cries they were, cries
as of children in distress, and I rose to a sitting posture on the deck
with my hair standing up straight, to discover Nick beside me in the same
position.

"God have mercy on us," I heard him mutter, "what's that? It sounds like
the wail of all the babies since the world began."

We listened together, and I can give no notion of the hideous
mournfulness of the sound. We lay in a swampy little inlet, and the
forest wall made a dark blur against the star-studded sky. There was a
splash near the boat that made me clutch my legs, the wails ceased and
began again with redoubled intensity. Nick and I leaped to our feet and
stood staring, horrified, over the gunwale into the black water.
Presently there was a laugh behind us, and we saw Xavier resting on his
elbow.

"What devil-haunted place is this?" demanded Nick.

"Ha, ha," said Xavier, shaking with unseemly mirth, "you have never heard
ze alligator sing, Michie?"

"Alligator!" cried Nick; "there are babies in the water, I tell you."

"Ha, ha," laughed Xavier, flinging off his blanket and searching for his
flint and tinder. He lighted a pine knot, and in the red pulsing flare
we saw what seemed to be a dozen black logs floating on the surface. And
then Xavier flung the cresset at them, fire and all. There was a
lashing, a frightful howl from one of the logs, and the night's silence
once more.

Often after that our slumbers were disturbed, and we would rise with
maledictions in our mouths to fling the handiest thing at the serenaders.
When we arose in the morning we would often see them by the dozens,
basking in the shallows, with their wide mouths flapped open waiting for
their prey. Sometimes we ran upon them in the water, where they looked
like the rough-bark pine logs from the North, and Nick would have a shot
at them. When he hit one fairly there would be a leviathan-like roar and
a churn