For once a year till of late—­I know not whether the thing may be seen still—­a strange phantom used to appear at San Fernando, twenty miles to the north.  Canoes of Indians came mysteriously across the Gulf of Paria from the vast swamps of the Orinoco; and the naked folk landed, and went up through the town, after the Naparima ladies (so runs the tale) had sent down to the shore garments for the women, which were worn only through the streets, and laid by again as soon as they entered the forest.  Silent, modest, dejected, the gentle savages used to vanish into the woods by paths known to their kinsfolk centuries ago—­paths which run, wherever possible, along the vantage-ground of the topmost chines and ridges of the hills.  The smoke of their fires rose out of lonely glens, as they collected the fruit of trees known only to themselves.  In a few weeks their wild harvest was over; they came back through San Fernando; made, almost in silence, their little purchases in the town, and paddled away across the gulf towards the unknown wildernesses from whence they came.

And now—­as if sent to drive away sad thoughts and vain regrets—­ before our feet lay a jest of Nature’s, almost as absurd as a ’four-eyed fish,’ or ‘calling-crab.’  A rough stick, of the size of your little finger, lay on the pitch.  We watched it a moment, and saw that it was crawling—­that it was a huge Caddis, like those in English ponds and streams, though of a very different family.  They are the larvae of Phryganeas—­this of a true moth. {158} The male of this moth will come out, as a moth should, and fly about on four handsome wings.  The female will never develop her wings, but remain to her life’s end a crawling grub, like the female of our own Vapourer moth, and that of our English Glow-worm.  But more, she will never (at least, in some species of this family) leave her silk and bark case, but live and die, an anchoritess in narrow cell, leaving behind her more than one puzzle for physiologists.  The case is fitted close to the body of the caterpillar, save at the mouth, where it hangs loose in two ragged silken curtains.  We all looked at the creature, and it looked at us, with its last two or three joints and its head thrust out of its house.  Suddenly, disgusted at our importunity, it laid hold of its curtains with two hands, right and left, like a human being, folded them modestly over its head, held them tight together, and so retired to bed, amid the inextinguishable laughter of the whole party.

The noble Moriche palm delights in wet, at least in Trinidad and on the lower Orinoco:  but Schomburgk describes forests of them—­if, indeed, it be the same species—­as growing in the mountains of Guiana up to an altitude of four thousand feet.  The soil in which they grow here is half pitch pavement, half loose brown earth, and over both, shallow pools of water, which will become much deeper in the wet season; and all about float or