After breakfast—­call it luncheon rather—­we started for the lagoon.  We had set our hearts on seeing Manatis (’sea cows’), which are still not uncommon on the east coast of this island, though they have been exterminated through the rest of the West Indies since the days of Pere Labat.  That good missionary speaks of them in his delightful journal as already rare in the year 1695; and now, as far as I am aware, none are to be found north of Trinidad and the Spanish Main, save a few round Cuba and Jamaica.  We were anxious, too, to see, if not to get, a boa-constrictor of one kind or other.  For there are two kinds in the island, which may be seen alive at the Zoological Gardens in the same cage.  The true Boa, {277a} which is here called Mahajuel, is striped as well as spotted with two patterns, one over the other.  The Huillia, Anaconda, or Water-boa, {277b} bears only a few large round spots.  Both are fond of the water, the Huillia living almost entirely in it; both grow to a very large size; and both are dangerous, at least to children and small animals.  That there were Huillias about the place, possibly within fifty yards of the house, there was no doubt.  One of our party had seen with his own eyes one of seven-and-twenty feet long killed, with a whole kid inside it, only a few miles off.  The brown policeman, crossing an arm of the Guanapo only a month or two before, had been frightened by meeting one in the ford, which his excited imagination magnified so much that its head was on the one bank while its tail was on the other—­a measurement which must, I think, be divided at least by three.  But in the very spot in which we stood, some four years since, happened what might have been a painful tragedy.  Four young ladies, whose names were mentioned to me, preferred, not wisely, a bathe in the still lagoon to one in the surf outside; and as they disported themselves, one of them felt herself seized from behind.  Fancying that one of her sisters was playing tricks, she called out to her to let her alone; and looking up, saw, to her astonishment, her three sisters sitting on the bank, and herself alone.  She looked back, and shrieked for help:  and only just in time; for the Huillia had her.  The other three girls, to their honour, dashed in to her assistance.  The brute had luckily got hold, not of her poor little body, but of her bathing-dress, and held on stupidly.  The girls pulled; the bathing-dress, which was, luckily, of thin cotton, was torn off; the Huillia slid back again with it in his mouth into the dark labyrinth of the mangrove-roots; and the girl was saved.  Two minutes’ delay, and his coils would have been round her; and all would have been over.