My visits to the kingfisher's osier-beds were often really Platonic. There were no eggs to be taken that I had not enough of and to spare in my collection. Albeit the chance of a cuckoo's egg always made looking into every nest I found "a pleasurable expectation," which was just often enough fulfilled to make the quest a perpetual hope. Not that the keeper--"arbiter of this terraqueous swamp"--would have believed me if he had caught me, and no monkey in Brazilian forests hated the jaguar more [Illustration: DID I HEAR SOME ONE?] than I hated the keeper. Sometimes just as I was really happy, and doing nothing more criminal than watching a water-rat that was trying to balance itself on an arrowhead stem while it reached up to the seeds, I would hear his detestable splashing--stealthy, he thought it, no doubt, the clumsy wretch, but noisy enough to warn my Red Indian ears a long way off--and I had to go. His own squelching feet and big body forcing a way through the osiers, which whipped his face as he went, hid the noise of my retreat as I slipped along like some fox, hardly scaring the birds that I passed, and cunningly stepping from point to point so as scarcely to make a splash. And so out at the other end and up into the high road and home as hard as I could run. On one occasion, all but taken by surprise, I suddenly heard the keeper's step close by, and had to slip into the water and sit there, like a coot, with only my head above the surface, and that half-hidden by reeds--and he passed, oh! so close to me, stopped for an instant to wonder to himself, perhaps, why the water was rippling so, and then went on, so cautiously, so cunningly, knowing that a boy was somewhere about, and expecting to pounce on him; while I just as cautiously rose from my sloppy, weedy lair, and crept off in the other direction, and got into the dusty road, my boots squelching dreadfully, and making as I jogged along (as Ben Jonson says) "great S's like a watering-pot."