After trudging about for some time, filling our lungs with vapour from the steaming swamp, while our skins were irritated by the bites of myriads of insects, we reached a dark, evil-smelling lagoon crusted with cracking mud. At the side of it were several indentations, varying in size, which indicated that a 'gator family had but recently been taking the sun. With such tangible evidence before me of the near presence of the brutes, I suggested waiting quietly for the family's reappearance. Corker, however, having his own idea about the wisdom of my suggestion, told me I should only be wasting time. He therefore elected to leave me with the boy, whilst he crossed to the middle stream "to make sure of a decent hide," asking me to join him when I was tired of my vigil. [Illustration: "I FIRED CLEAN INTO HIS MAW."] As he tramped off through the inky slime I squatted down on a mud-bank, with my rifle across my knees. Between me and the indentations was a low clump of vegetation, which shielded me from observation without interfering with my vision. The boy I had stationed out of sight in a slight hollow on the far side of my mud perch. With these precautions I set myself to wait. The sun, well overhead, beat down pitilessly on my shadeless position, blistering the pattern of my thin shirt on to my skin; whilst all the most vicious mosquitoes of the swamp came to signify their appreciation of my succulent presence by dining on me, and other creeping things began the tour of investigation which my scanty attire of shirt, breeches, boots, and topée invited. Verily, ye men who grumble at the hardship of waiting for driven birds on a Scotch moor should try a day in a tropical swamp! After enduring these manifold pleasures for an hour or more, the surface of the lagoon began to heave, and a black snout showed itself in the sunlight. Looking round, and finding no cause for alarm, the wily 'gator slushed his way to his basking place, some twenty yards distant from where I sat. I raised my rifle slowly and covered him as he hoisted himself out of the slime. Just then the distant crack of Corker's rifle startled my 'gator. Raising his head he opened his capacious jaws, and as he did so I fired clean into his maw. He shut his teeth together with a resounding snap, coughed like a stricken cow, and slid back into the slime. I thought I had lost him, but after a final titanic convulsion, which spattered the blood-streaked mud almost to my position, he swung round on to the ooze again and lay still. Advancing to within five yards, I gave him another bullet through the eye, to prevent accidents; then, aided by my yelling boy, we levered him up on to the dry bank. From the end of his snout to the tip of his powerful tail he measured about eleven feet!