Martin used to lie in the canoe half asleep and watch the little face of the marmoset, until, by some unaccountable mental process, he came to think of Aunt Dorothy Grumbit.  Often did poor Martin dream of his dear old aunt, while sleeping under the shelter of these strange-leaved tropical trees and surrounded by the wild sounds of that distant land, until he dreamed himself back again in the old village.  Then he would rush to the well-known school, and find all the boys there except Bob Croaker, who he felt certain must be away drowning the white kitten; and off he would go and catch him, sure enough, in the very act, and would give him the old thrashing over again, with all the additional vigour acquired during his rambles abroad thrown into it.  Then he would run home in eager haste, and find old Mrs. Grumbit hard at the one thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth pair of worsted socks; and fat Mr. Arthur Jollyboy sitting opposite to her, dressed in the old lady’s bed-curtain chintz and high-crowned cap, with the white kitten in his arms and his spectacles on his chin, watching the process with intense interest, and cautioning her not to forget the “hitch” by any means; whereupon the kitten would fly up in his face, and Mr. Jollyboy would dash through the window with a loud howl, and Mrs. Grumbit’s face would turn blue; and, uncoiling an enormous tail, she would bound shrieking after him in among the trees and disappear!  Martin usually wakened at this point, and found the marmoset gazing in his face with an expression of sorrowful solemnity, and the old sun-dried trader staring vacantly before him as he steered his light craft down the broad stream of the Tocantins.

The trader could speak little more English than sufficed to enable him to say “yes” and “no”; Barney could speak about as much Portuguese as enabled him to say “no” and “yes”; while Martin, by means of a slight smattering of that language, which he had picked up by ear during the last few months, mixed now and then with a word or two of Latin, and helped out by a clever use of the language of signs, succeeded in becoming the link of communication between the two.

For many weeks they continued to descend the river; paddling energetically when the stream was sluggish, and resting comfortably when the stream was strong, and sometimes dragging their canoe over rocks and sand-banks to avoid rapids—­passing many villages and plantations of the natives by the way—­till at last they swept out upon the bosom of the great Amazon River.

The very first thing they saw upon entering it was an enormous alligator, fully eighteen feet long, sound asleep on a mud-bank.

“Och! put ashore, ye Naygur,” cried Barney, seizing his pistol and rising up in the bow of the canoe.  The old man complied quickly, for his spirit was high and easily roused.

“Look out now, Martin, an’ hould back the dog for fear he wakes him up,” said Barney, in a hoarse whisper, as he stepped ashore and hastened stealthily towards the sleeping monster; catching up a handful of gravel as he went, and ramming it down the barrel of his pistol.  It was a wonderful pistol that—­an Irish one by birth, and absolutely incapable of bursting, else assuredly it would have gone, as its owner said, to “smithereens” long ago.