Next morning, before daylight, we started with Mr. D---- across the lagoon to a place about an hour's row from the village, where he said he was in the habit of getting wild duck. The lake was so shallow that our boat often grounded, and the oars at each stroke disturbed the black, ink-like mud that constituted the bottom. The sides were beautifully wooded, and surrounded by ranges of hills extending far into the interior, the edges of the water being fringed with a belt of mangrove-trees, whose peculiarly bright green foliage contrasted pleasingly with the sombre coloring of the leafless trees behind them. The perfectly stagnant water was of a light-yellow tint, and as full of alligators as it could well be.... After firing a good many shots, and gathering a somewhat miscellaneous bag, Mr. D---- saw a large alligator asleep on some mud, lying half in and half out of the water; and as I was the only one of the party who had brought any bullets, he sent one of the guides to show me where it lay, in hope that I might get a shot. Slowly, and with the greatest caution, I waded through water until I got within twelve yards of where the brute lay, and aiming about an inch behind the eye, drove a bullet clean into his brain. He gave a convulsive kind of shudder and lash with his tail, and was, I believe, dead; but to make certain I gave him the second barrel at about four yards' distance behind the shoulder, and then felt quite confident that I had indeed "wound him up." It was some time before we could induce the natives to assist in pulling him on dry land. Though they do not mind them living and swimming about, they are particularly careful of a wounded one, a single sweep of its powerful tail, even when mortally stricken, being known to break both legs of a man like a pipe-stem. Though dead enough to all intents and purposes, an alligator, like either a shark or a turtle, will continue possessed of a certain amount of vitality and motion for a long period after life is really extinct. This fellow was still gently swaying his tail about while we bent on a rope to it, and, all five of us clapping on, soon hauled him to the dry mud on the bank, where we took his length, opened his jaws, and generally examined the formidable-looking reptile at our leisure. He was about fifteen feet long and inconceivably hideous. The first bullet had smashed a large hole exactly where I aimed,--namely, about one inch behind the eye; the skull seemed comparatively thin there, was unprotected by any thick skin, and a large lump of his brain was oozing through the wound. The second bullet went through his heart; but I am convinced that it was unnecessary, as the first shot had done all that was needful.