compelled her to remain as “bait.” Maria was sent back to San Fernando in the next canoe we met bound down the river. The abundance of the big, spotted cats and their harmlessness under ordinary circumstances is astonishing, although at times they will attack human beings. At one of the rubber-camps we were shown the skin of a recently killed animal which had stalked a two-year-old child at play not far from the hut; the mother, a negress, seeing the animal in time, attacked it with a _machete_ and killed it. The next river of any importance to be encountered was the Rio Lao, reached February 17. Up to this time the strong north wind had continued to blow without interruption, and the course of the river was dotted with islands. Rubber-camps were situated on the river-bank, and we had our first glimpses of the Maquiritare Indians. Owing to the frequent rains, the year had been a bad one for the _patrones_, or managers of the camps; also, a kind of malady had broken out among the _peons_ and Indians which killed many and frightened others away. Nevertheless, those who remained seemed quite contented, and if we chanced to spend the night at a camp or _barraca_, our men always joined them in their pastime of drinking, playing the guitar, and singing songs about one another, far into the night. Some of the men were clever at improvising songs apropos of the occasion. At one place, for instance, they heard of the jaguar’s visit to the sand-bank, and that the captain’s wife had been sent back to San Fernando. Without hesitation one of the peons sang: _Qué tristeza en nuestro campamento, Pobrecito Ildefonso está llorando, A caramba, nadie está alegre, Será porqué Maria fué á San Fernando._ The largest _barraca_ by far which we saw was owned by an old Turk named Parraquete. He received us cordially, shook our hands, and embraced us, apologetically explaining that a slight fever prevented his rising from the hammock; later we found out that he was a leper in the last stages of the disease. He had fifteen Maquiritares in his employ, each of whom collected the latex from several hundred rubber-trees every morning; in the afternoon the milk was smoked, one hundred pounds of the liquid yielding about forty or fifty pounds of crude rubber. A species of heavy, deep-red wood called _mazarandul_ was used to produce the dense smoke necessary to coagulate the latex. _Hevea_ only was gathered here, although _balata_ was also collected farther down the river and on the Guaviare. The governor of the district told me that about fifteen million trees of the _balata_ had been cut down along the latter river during the last ten years, as the method used to secure this class of rubber necessitates felling the trees.