I will here add a word on the dreaded venomous insects of the tropics. The ant and mosquito plagues of the coast jungles can hardly be over-estimated, but the virulence of their larger congeners is frequently and grossly exaggerated. The chief insect-ogres of sensation romancers and fireside travellers are three: the scorpion, the tarantula, and the centipede, either of whom can rival the homicidal prestige of Victor Hugo's octopus. But I may confidently appeal to the verdict of any personal observer who has passed a few years in the African or American tropics when I assert that these supposed express-messengers of Death are not more venomous and are far less aggressive than our common North American hornet. I doubt if the sting of twenty tarantulas could cause the death of a healthy child, and I am quite sure that a poison-ivy blister and the bite of a fire-ant are more painful than the sting of a centipede. An hysterical lady may succumb to the bite of a common gadfly, but I hold that only co-operative insects--termites, wasps, bumble-bees, etc.--could ever make away with a normally constituted human being. A swarm of vociferous iris-crows appeared in the sky overhead, and before they had passed, the woods were wide awake all around. The humming-birds were on the wing, the wood-pigeons repeated their murmuring call in the taxus-groves, and from the lower depths of the forest came the chattering scream of a squirrel-monkey. The rising sun was hidden by the tree-tops of the eastern valleys when we halted on the summit of a rocky bluff, but the mountain mists had disappeared, and the vistas on our left afforded a dazzling view of the sunlit foot-hills and the valley of the Rio Verde. The river is here crossed by a rope-ferry a little above its junction with a tributary that drains the glorious valley of Morillo and an Alpine group whose wooded heights stand in my memory like a vision of a Ganadesha, the mountain park of Indra's Paradise. The air of these woodlands is the antithesis of our Northern workshop atmosphere. There is a feeling of delight--our lost sixth sense, I am tempted to call it--which gratifies the lungs rather than the olfactory organ if you inhale the morning breezes, oxidated, and perhaps ozonized, by the first influence of sunlight on the aromatic vegetation of these hills,--a delight which, like the charm of harmonious sounds, reacts on the soul, and awakens emotions which have lain dormant in the human breast since we exchanged the air of our Summer-land home for the dust of our hyperborean tenement-prisons.