[116] Length 6 inches, expanse 8⁶⁄₁₀, flexure 2⁷⁄₁₀, tail 1²⁄₁₀, rictus ⁷⁄₁₀, bare portion of tibia ³⁄₁₀, tarsus 1, middle toe 1⁷⁄₂₀. Irides brick-red; beak dark olive, edges at base paler green; legs and feet clay-colour. Forehead, crown, and occiput black, softening at the sides and nape; a black band from rictus passes through the eye, above which is a band of white, interrupted by black immediately over the eye. Sides of head and neck, yellowish-ash, blending with the black. Back, shoulders, scapulars, and loins yellowish-umber, each feather deepening in the centre to dark brown, with a conspicuous stripe of pure white running through the middle of the terminal half. Wing-coverts yellowish-brown; the greater coverts and the tertiaries have dark centres, and terminal white spots. Primaries and secondaries greyish black. Tail coverts black, with broad spots and tips of white; tail as the tertiaries. Chin, throat, and whole under parts white, slightly tinged on the breast with buff. Sides, flanks, under-tail-coverts, and outer part of thighs, marked with transverse bands of black and white. In travelling from Bluefields to Savannah le Mar, we save about two miles by taking what is called the Short Cut, a bridle-path through the deep matted woods. The trees are largely sweet-wood, tangled, near the edges of the broad morass, which occupies so much of this plain, by spreading bushes of black-withe and cockspur. Two streams are to be forded, the one a sluggish water that crosses the path immediately on our entering the woods, the other is the deep and rapid Sweet River. After pursuing for more than a mile the track through the bush, which here and there opens on each side into secluded grassy glades, adorned with many flowers, and haunted by gay butterflies, the gradual predominance of marsh plants, _sagittaria_, ginger-fern, bulrush, and black-withe, to the exclusion at length, of every thing else, warns us of our approach to the river, and at length we come suddenly upon it in all its beauty. Emerging darkly into view from beneath overhanging trees on the right, upon which is spread a thick drapery of convolvuli, whose lovely festoons, gemmed with purple and green, depend to the very surface of the water, the stream gurgles along a pebbly bed, or here and there glides with treacherous smoothness over quicksands hidden by the waving tresses of the dark green _equisetum_; and is presently lost again in the meandering of its tortuous course through the bushes.