There are strange birds, too.  One, whom you may see in the Zoological Gardens, like a plover with a straight beak and bittern’s plumage, from ‘The Main,’ whose business is to walk about the table at meals uttering sad metallic noises and catching flies.  His name is Sun-bird, {93a} ‘Sun-fowlo’ of the Surinam Negroes, according to dear old Stedman, ’because, when it extends its wings, which it often does, there appears on the interior part of each wing a most beautiful representation of the sun.  This bird,’ he continues very truly, ’might be styled the perpetual motion, its body making a continual movement, and its tail keeping time like the pendulum of a clock.’ {93b} A game-bird, olive, with a bare red throat, also from The Main, called a Chacaracha, {93c} who is impudently brave, and considers the house his own; and a great black Curassow, {93d} also from The Main, who patronises the turkeys and guinea-fowl; stalks in dignity before them; and when they do not obey, enforces his authority by pecking them to death.  There is thus plenty of amusement here, and instruction too, for those to whom the ways of dumb animals during life are more interesting than their stuffed skins after death.

But there is the signal-gun, announcing the arrival of the Mail from home.  And till it departs again there will be no time to add to this hasty, but not unfaithful, sketch of first impressions in a tropic island.

CHAPTER VI:  MONOS

Early in January, I started with my host and his little suite on an expedition to the islands of the Bocas.  Our object was twofold:  to see tropical coast scenery, and to get, if possible, some Guacharo birds (pronounced Huacharo), of whom more hereafter.  Our chance of getting them depended on the sea being calm outside the Bocas, as well as inside.  The calm inside was no proof of the calm out.  Port of Spain is under the lee of the mountains; and the surf might be thundering along the northern shore, tearing out stone after stone from the soft cliffs, and shrouding all the distant points in salt haze, though the gulf along which we were rowing was perfectly smooth, and the shipping and the mangrove scrub and the coco-palms hung double, reflected as in a mirror, not of glass but of mud; and on the swamps of the Caroni the malarious fog hung motionless in long straight lines, waiting for the first blaze of sunrise to sublime it and its invisible poisons into the upper air, where it would be swept off, harmless, by the trade-wind which rushed along half a mile above our heads.