By this time the Italian captain in his tug had gently brought the other lighter to the beach, and from its side another string of horses came out on to the grass. They too all rolled, and, seeing the other band, by degrees mixed with it, so that four hundred horses soon were feeding ravenously on the sweet grass just at the little river’s mouth that lay between its banks and the thick belt of wood. Though it was early, still the sun was hot, and for an hour we held the horses back, keeping them from the water till they had eaten well. The Italian tugmaster, having produced a bottle of trade gin (the Anchor brand), and having drank our health, solemnly wiped the neck of the bottle with his grimy hand and passed it round to us. We also drank to his good health and voyage to the port, that he pronounced as if it were written “Bono Airi,” adding, as it was war-time, “Avanti Savoia” to the toast. He grinned, and with a gesture of his thick dirty hand, adorned with two or three coppery-looking rings, as it were, embedded in the flesh, pronounced an all-embracing curse on the Tedeschi, and went aboard the tug. When he had made the lighters fast, he turned down stream, saluting us with three shrill blasts upon the whistle, and left us and our horses thousands of miles away from steam and smoke, blaspheming skippers, and the noise and push of modern life. Humming-birds poised themselves before the purple bunches of the ceiba {25} flowers, their tongues thrust into the calyx and their iridescent wings whirring so rapidly, you could see the motion, but not mark the movement, and from the yellow balls of the mimosas came a scent, heady and comforting. Flocks of green parroquets flew shrieking over the clearing in which the horses fed, to their great nests, in which ten or a dozen seemed to harbour, and hung suspended from them by their claws, or crawled into the holes. Now and then a few locusts, wafted by the breeze, passed by upon their way to spread destruction in the plantations of young poplars and of orange trees in the green islands in the stream.