dogs.  These dugouts were manned by Indian and half-caste paddlers, and the fazendeiros, who were of nearly pure white blood, also at times paddled vigorously.  All were dressed in substantially similar clothes, the difference being that those of the camaradas, the poorer men or laborers, were in tatters.  In the canoes no man wore anything save a shirt, trousers, and hat, the feet being bare.  On horseback they wore long leather leggings which were really simply high, rather flexible boots with the soles off; their spurs were on their tough bare feet.  There was every gradation between and among the nearly pure whites, negroes, and Indians.  On the whole, there was the most white blood in the upper ranks, and most Indian and negro blood among the camaradas; but there were exceptions in both classes, and there was no discrimination on account of color.  All alike were courteous and friendly.

The hounds were at first carried in two of the dugouts, and then let loose on the banks.  We went up-stream for a couple of hours against the swift current, the paddlers making good headway with their pointed paddles—­the broad blade of each paddle was tipped with a long point, so that it could be thrust into the mud to keep the low dugout against the bank.  The tropical forest came down almost like a wall, the tall trees laced together with vines, and the spaces between their trunks filled with a low, dense jungle.  In most places it could only be penetrated by a man with a machete.  With few exceptions the trees were unknown to me, and their native names told me nothing.  On most of them the foliage was thick; among the exceptions were the cecropias, growing by preference on new-formed alluvial soil bare of other trees, whose rather scanty leaf bunches were, as I was informed, the favorite food of sloths.  We saw one or two squirrels among the trees, and a family of monkeys.  There were few sand-banks in the river, and no water-fowl save an occasional cormorant.  But as we pushed along near the shore, where the branches overhung and dipped in the swirling water, we continually roused little flocks of bats.  They were hanging from the boughs right over the river, and when our approach roused them they zigzagged rapidly in front of us for a few rods, and then again dove in among the branches.

At last we landed at a point of ground where there was little jungle, and where the forest was composed of palms and was fairly open.  It was a lovely bit of forest.  The colonel strolled off in one direction, returning an hour later with a squirrel for the naturalists.  Meanwhile Fiala and I went through the palm wood to a papyrus-swamp.  Many trails led through the woods, and especially along the borders of the swamp; and, although their principal makers had evidently been cattle, yet there were in them footprints of both tapir and deer.  The tapir makes a footprint much like that of a small rhinoceros, being one of the odd-toed ungulates.  We could hear the dogs now and then, evidently scattered and running on various trails.  They were a worthless lot of cur-hounds.  They would chase tapir or deer or anything else that ran away from them as long as the trail was easy to follow; but they were not stanch, even after animals that fled, and they would have nothing whatever to do with animals that were formidable.