About the middle of an afternoon in July, 1848, we had landed on a low sand-bank, which, for a short distance, skirted the right bank of the stream, for the purpose of encamping for the night; and right glad were we to stretch our limbs after ten hours' paddling. The Indians had started in their wood-skin up the neighboring creek, in quest of game for our evening's repast, and the women were clearing a space beneath the branches for our hammocks, and collecting fuel for the nightly fire. All who have wandered with the pleasant Waterton in his chivalrous Expedition on the Essequibo, will remember his first guiltless attempt to hook the wary cayman, before seeking more skillful allies in the Indian settlement higher up the river. The sand-bank in which we were about to bivouac, was that mentioned in his narrative, where, for four days, he had impatiently waited for the shades of evening, and as often turned into his hammock at day-break with his longings ungratified. It was, as usual, intensely hot in the sun. To seek some relief, for the first time during the day, I strolled--or rather straggled, for every step through the tangled creepers had to be gained by hacking and hewing with a cutlass--down to the cool banks of the creek, whose overhanging branches, forming a magnificent arcade of verdure, almost excluded (or admitted only at distant intervals), the scorching rays. Seating myself on the smooth gray trunk of a tree, which lay prostrate across the sluggish water, whose broken limbs shone bright in the gay drapery of a scarlet-blossomed epiphyte, I lighted my pipe, and taking a book from my pocket, began lazily turning over the pages and lightly gleaning the pleasant thought of a witty and social poet. My attention now and again drawn away by the ceaseless tappings of a yellow-headed woodpecker on a decaying tree close at hand, to the glittering flashes of a Karabimitas, a Topaz-throated humming-bird--a frequenter of dark and solitary creeks, capturing flies among the gay petals, for his nest-keeping partner, who, a few paces up the stream was gently swinging with the evening breezes in her tiny home. I had been in this position for some time, little regarding the whizzing hum of insects constantly passing and repassing--when, my gaze chancing to fall a yard or more from my resting-place, I detected a small bright-gray bee, about the third of an inch in length, disappearing in what seemed a solid part of the trunk.