Lops—which Jack said was short for Nyctalops, or ‘seer by night’—and I had many a chat afterwards. He told me of his old home in sunny Mexico, not a nest such as I was born in, but a cavity in the trunk of a vast live oak or ilex, from whose boughs long weepers of grey Spanish moss trailed towards the brown palmetto-stained water below; of the hot sun and of the furious tropical storms which lashed the deep river into white foam; of the paroquets, with their brilliant plumage of green and red and blue, which screamed harshly among the upper branches at dawn; of the rusty-hued water-vipers which coiled sluggishly on the steaming mud in summer. He told, too, of the perils from great hawks three times as large as any we know in England, from long, thin tree-snakes wrapped unseen round the branches; and I shuddered when he talked of fierce wild-cats as much at home among the tree-tops as on the ground. It must have been a wonderful country and a wonderful life, so different from our northern island as to be almost beyond my imagination to picture it. All day the land slept breathless beneath the blazing sun, with nothing moving except the birds, the fox-squirrels, and the lizards; and during those hours Lops and his family slept in the dark recesses of their wood-walled fortress; but when the sun set the forest woke to life. Deer came down to the river to drink; peccaries rooted in droves among the bases of the mighty trees; sometimes a great bear came prowling along, uttering now and then a deep ‘woof’ when any unaccustomed sound disturbed him. Up above opossums and racoons moved silently to and fro among the tree-tops; great owls whirled on soft wings, hooting dismally; while all night long—especially in the hot season—the endless chirr of crickets, the pipe of tree-frogs and the deep booming of bull-frogs filled the air with a never-ending concert. Other sounds there were, rarer, but far more terrifying. Enormous bull-alligators, floating like logs with only their gnarled heads and the ridges of their rugged backs above the water, would bellow with a roar that shook the forest; or, again, from some hidden recess of the deepest woods the blood-curdling shriek of the tawny puma would ring hideously through the night.