Most of those who are not busy cooking spend their time preparing new bast shirts, the material for which is found almost everywhere in the neighborhood of our halting-places. Soon the wood is alive with the sound of hatchets and the crack of falling trees; and, even before they are summoned to breakfast, they return with pieces of a silky bast of about four and a half yards long and somewhat less than one and a quarter yard wide. Their implements for shirt-making are of primitive simplicity,--a heavy wooden hammer with notches, called maceta, and a round piece of wood to work upon. Continuously beaten with the maceta, the fibres of the bast become loosened, until the originally hard piece of wood gets soft and flexible, and about double its former breadth. After it has been washed, wrung out to remove the sap, and dried in the sun, it has the appearance of a coarse woollen stuff of a bright whitish-yellow or light brown, disclosing two main layers of wavy fibres held together by smaller filaments. A more easily prepared and better working-garment for a tropical climate is hardly to be found than this, called cascara by the Indians of Bolivia, and turury by those of the Amazon. Its cut is as simple and classical as its material. A hole is cut in the middle of a piece about ten feet long, to pass the head through, and the depending skirt is sewn together on both sides, from below up to the height of the girdle, which usually is a piece of cotton string or liana. Another branch of industry our Indians were busy at, in their hours of leisure, was the fabrication of straw hats, with the young leaves of a kind of little palm, the same which supplies the excellent hats imported from Ecuador and Peru, and known in Europe under the name of Chile or Panama hats. Dexterity at all sorts of wicker-work seems to be innate to this race; and the prettiest little baskets and the finest mats of colored palm-leaves are to be bought on the Missions of the Mamore at the lowest prices. [Illustration: A SOUTH SEA ISLAND]