though we had been nigh six hours in the saddle, but with curiosity.  For he had promised to send out the hunters for all game that could be found, and give us a true forest meal; and we were curious to taste what lapo, quenco, guazupita-deer, and other strange meats might be like.  Nay, some of us agreed, that if the hunters had but brought in a tender young red monkey, {282a} we would surely eat him too, if it were but to say that we had done it.  But the hunters had had no luck.  They had brought in only a Pajui, {282b} an excellent game bird; an Ant-eater, {282c} and a great Cachicame, or nine-banded Armadillo.  The ant-eater the foolish fellows had eaten themselves—­I would have given them what they asked for his skeleton; but the Armadillo was cut up and hashed for us, and was eaten, to the last scrap, being about the best game I ever tasted.  I fear he is a foul feeder at times, who by no means confines himself to roots, or even worms.  If what I was told be true, there is but too much probability for Captain Mayne Reid’s statement, that he will eat his way into the soft parts of a dead horse, and stay there until he has eaten his way out again.  But, to do him justice, I never heard him accused, like the giant Armadillo {282d} of the Main, of digging dead bodies out of their graves, as he is doing in a very clever drawing in Mr. Wood’s Homes without Hands.  Be that as it may, the Armadillo, whatever he feeds on, has the power of transmuting it into most delicate and wholesome flesh.

Meanwhile—­and hereby hangs a tale—­I was interested, not merely in the Armadillo, but in the excellent taste with which it, and everything else, was cooked in a little open shed over a few stones and firesticks.  And complimenting my host thereon, I found that he had, there in the primeval forest, an admirable French cook, to whom I begged to be introduced at once.  Poor fellow!  A little lithe Parisian, not thirty years old, he had got thither by a wild road.  Cook to some good bourgeois family in Paris, he had fallen in love with his master’s daughter, and she with him.  And when their love was hopeless, and discovered, the two young foolish things, not having—­as is too common in France—­the fear of God before their eyes, could think of no better resource than to shut themselves up with a pan of lighted charcoal, and so go they knew not-whither.  The poor girl went—­and was found dead.  But the boy recovered; and was punished with twenty years of Cayenne; and here he was now, on a sort of ticket-of-leave, cooking for his livelihood.  I talked a while with him, cheered him with some compliments about the Parisians, and so forth, dear to the Frenchman’s heart—­what else was there to say?—­and so left him, not without the fancy that, if he had had but such an education as the middle classes in Paris have not, there were the makings of a man in that keen eye, large jaw, sharp chin.  ‘The very fellow,’ said some one, ’to have been a first-rate Zouave.’  Well:  perhaps he was a better man, even as he was, than as a Zouave.