Max showed plainly in what esteem he held naturalists. The first day he went out with us he was neatly dressed in dark blue jeans. When he appeared on the second morning we did not recognize him. A small ragamuffin stood before us, stamping like a pony to drive away the flies, which hovered about his ankles. His clothes were a mass of rags—it was impossible to say what had been the original color or material. Max had taken our measure and decided that people who tramped through the “bush” as we did were not worthy of anything better than rags. Sometimes in the jungle we would meet Indian women who, living far in the interior, were on their way to Guanoco to buy machetes, fish-hooks and other articles of civilization. They would always stop and make friends with us, with child-like curiosity asking where we came from, and why we wanted birds and lizards and butterflies, and murmuring the words dear to every woman’s heart in all lands, “_Que jovencita!_” which literally translated is “What a young little thing!” Very simple-hearted are these poor Indian women and so hard are their lives that at a very early age do they cease to be _jovencita_. We would often meet the wandering tribes of Guarauno Indians, who live nearly always upon the march, carrying all their worldly possessions upon their backs and sleeping wherever night happens to find them. They very rarely knew even a word of Spanish and shunned any intercourse with strangers, scorning the inventions of civilization and using the poisoned arrows of their ancestors. One Sunday morning one of the laborers at the near-by Pitch Lake, bearing the pious name of José de Jesus Zamoro, came into headquarters to invite us to a dance that afternoon at his house. The house of Zamoro had nothing particularly to recommend it as a ballroom; for the floor was of dirt, the ceiling low and the walls windowless. But it was crowded; the air stifling and the dancers dripping with perspiration. The music was wild and strange, the man who shook the _maracas_—an instrument consisting of two gourds filled with dried seeds which is shaken in time to the music—often breaking into a weird song, making up the words as he went along, with some joke about each dancer. As the songster’s zeal waxed high he described himself as being so great that “where he stood the earth trembled.” Between dances the ladies’ last partners were supposed to take them into the next room where drinks were for sale. This was the explanation of Zamoro’s zeal for dances: music and dance hall were free, but a substantial profit came from the drinks.