an outsider. I formed pleasant
friendships there and entered into the lives of many of its people,
so I shall always think of it with affection. The village is placed
where the Itecoahy runs at right angles into the Javary, the right-hand
bank of the Itecoahy forming at once its main and its only street. The
houses stand facing this street, all very primitive and all elevated
on palm-trunk poles as far as possible above the usual high-water
mark of the river. Everything, from the little sheet-iron church
to the pig-sty, is built on poles. Indeed, if there is anything in
the theory of evolution, it will not be many generations before the
inhabitants and domestic animals are born equipped with stilts.

Opposite Remate de Males, across the Itecoahy, is a collection of
some ten huts that form the village of Sao Francisco, while across
the Javary is the somewhat larger village of Nazareth. Like every real
metropolis, you see, Remate de Males has its suburbs. Nazareth is in
Peruvian territory, the Javary forming the boundary between Brazil and
Peru throughout its length of some 700 miles. This same boundary line
is a source of amusing punctiliousness between the officials of each
country. To cross it is an affair requiring the exercise of the limits
of statesmanship. I well remember an incident that occurred during my
stay in the village. A sojourner in our town, an Indian rubber-worker
from the Ituhy River, had murdered a woman by strangling her. He
escaped in a canoe to Nazareth before the Brazilian officials could
capture him, and calmly took refuge on the porch of a house there,
where he sat down in a hammock and commenced to smoke cigarettes,
feeling confident that his pursuers would not invade Peruvian soil. But
local diplomacy was equal to the emergency. Our officials went to the
shore opposite Nazareth, and, hiding behind the trees, endeavoured to
pick off their man with their .44 Winchesters, reasoning that though
their crossing would be an international incident, no one could
object to a bullet's crossing. Their poor aim was the weak spot in
the plan. After a few vain shots had rattled against the sheet-iron
walls of the house where the fugitive was sitting, he got up from among
his friends and lost himself in the jungle, never to be heard of again.

About sixty-five houses, lining the bank of the Itecoahy River over a
distance of what would be perhaps six blocks in New York City, make up
Remate de Males. They are