h of the river; and the doctor urged the men
to make good speed across the lake, as he was excessively hungry, and
wanted his breakfast. He amused us in the meantime by recounting some
of his adventures with alligators. He had the most unbounded antipathy
towards the monsters; which arose, he said, from once seeing a poor
girl, who was stooping down to fill her pitcher with water at a river's
brink, seized by one of them. The horrible saurian, darting out of the
water and grasping her arm, dragged her off before he could go to her
rescue. He fired, but his bullet glanced off the scaly head of the
creature, which in an instant carried the unfortunate female, who was
shrieking loudly, under the surface. "There lay her pitcher on the
river's brink," said the doctor; "but she whom I had just before seen
full of health and strength, and singing gleefully, was nowhere visible.
I thereupon vowed vengeance against the whole race, and have never lost
an opportunity of slaughtering them."

The alligators and jaguars, the doctor told us, are mortal enemies. The
latter wages perpetual war against the former. Whenever a jaguar can
find an alligator asleep on a hot sand-bank, it attacks the saurian
under the tail, which, being soft and fat, is the most vulnerable part;
and such is the alligator's alarm, that it will scarcely move or make
the slightest resistance. If, however, it gets its enemy into the
water, its more peculiar element, then the tables are turned, and the
jaguar is in most instances drowned and devoured. The jaguar being well
aware of its inferiority to the saurian in the proper element of the
latter, when it has to cross a river it sets up a tremendous howl on the
bank previous to entering the water, in the hope of scaring the
alligator to a distance.

The native villages on the banks of a river in which alligators abound
are guarded by strong palisades, to prevent the monsters from creeping
on shore; which they will frequently do when pressed by hunger, and will
carry off any persons or animals they may encounter. An alligator has
been known to dash into the midst of a crowd collected on the shore and
carry off a strong man, in spite of every effort made to rescue the poor
fellow. Scarcely a year passes in the neighbourhood of places
frequented by them without two or three women being thus destroyed. The
doctor mentioned a remarkable instance of intrepidity and presence of
mind exhibited by a young girl