My wood road led up a gentle incline down which logs had been skidded, and after a half mile it merged gradually into the jungle. At the last sign of the axe I sat down on a fallen trunk and quietly waited. Three Blue Honey Creepers[136a]—two males and one green female,—dashed here and there in the branches close overhead. They uttered sharp cheeps, until the males flew at each other and began fighting furiously—ascending for fifty feet in a whirling spiral of hazy blue and black, and then clinching and falling to earth, where they clung together claw to claw, and pecked viciously and in silence, their beautiful plumage disheveled and broken. The lady—heartless cause of all this terrible strife—cheeped in low tones overhead and nonchalantly plucked invisible dainties from the undersides of leaves. I took a step toward the combatants and they separated and vanished, the lady, be it noted, following swiftly in their wake. Close upon this melodrama came a fairy Manakin, black with a conspicuous white chin. I never saw another and cannot identify it, distinctly marked though it was. Through the forest came the low belling of Green Cassiques;[150] then no sound save the drowsy hum of insects high overhead. The most frequent noise came from falling leaves, twigs and branches—yes, leaves, for “gently as a falling leaf” in this tropic world might mean, “like the stroke of a sledge hammer!” The realization comes again, as a yellow leaf eddies past my seat, that autumn is distributed throughout the whole year, while the freshly opening pink and reddish shoots on every hand show that spring is never absent. [Illustration: FIG. 129. AËRIAL ROOTS OF BUSH-ROPE.] I observed something circling about in an opening to my left and on examining it found a peculiar flat cake-like wasp nest, with the solitary pair of owners (_Polybia_ sp.) on the rim. It was attached to the extremity of a long, slender bush-thread dangling from a great distance above. There was not a breath of air and the secret of the circling motion—the nest moving irregularly in an ellipse of about ten feet—was not solved until with my glasses I made out a small monkey—a marmoset apparently—clinging to a branch near where the bush-thread started. The little creature had found some store of food in a hollow or crevice of the bark. To get his hand in, he was compelled to push aside the dangling curtain of aërial root-threads, and this occasional motion was enough to send the end, far below, sailing around in a large circle.