HOR.

  “This leech will suck the vein, until
  From your heart’s blood he gets his fill.”

In answer to a query, “whether the vampire of India and that of South America be of one species,” Mr. Waterton replies, “I beg to say that I consider them distinct species.  I have never yet seen a bat from India with a membrane rising perpendicularly from the end of its nose; nor have I ever been able to learn that bats in India suck animals, though I have questioned many people on this subject.  I could only find two species of bats in Guiana, with a membrane rising from the nose.  Both these kinds suck animals and eat fruit; while those bats without a membrane on the nose seem to live entirely upon fruit and insects, but chiefly insects.  A gentleman, by name Walcott, from Barbadoes, lived high up the river Demerara.  While I was passing a day or two at his house, the vampires sucked his son a boy of about ten or eleven years old, some of his fowls and his jack-ass.  The youth showed me his forehead at daybreak:  the wound was still bleeding apace, and I examined it with minute attention.  The poor ass was doomed to be a prey to these sanguinary imps of night:  he looked like misery steeped in vinegar.  I saw, by the numerous sores on his body, and by his apparent debility, that he would soon sink under his afflictions.  Mr. Walcott told me that it was with the greatest difficulty he could keep a few fowls, on account of the smaller vampire; and that the larger kind were killing his poor ass by inches.  It was the only quadruped he had brought up with him into the forest.

“Although I was so long in Dutch Guiana and visited the Orinoco and Cayenne, and ranged through part of the interior of Portuguese Guiana, still I could never find out how the vampires actually draw the blood; and, at this day, I am as ignorant of the real process as though I had never been in th” vampire’s country.  I should not feel so mortified at my total failure in attempting the discovery, had.  I not made such diligent search after the vampire, and examined its haunts.  Europeans may consider as fabulous the stories related of the vampire; but, for my own part, I must believe in its powers of sucking blood from living animals, as I have repeatedly seen both men and beasts which had been sucked, and, moreover, I have examined very minutely their bleeding wounds.

“Wishful of having it in my power to say that I had been sucked by the vampire, and not caring for the loss of ten or twelve ounces of blood, I frequently and designedly put myself in the way of trial.  But the vampire seemed to take a personal dislike to me; and the provoking brute would refuse to give my clavet one solitary trial, though he would tap the more favoured Indian’s toe, in a hammock within a few yards of mine.  For the space of eleven months, I slept alone in the loft of a woodcutter’s abandoned house in the forest; and though the vampire came in and out every night, and I had the finest opportunity of seeing him, as the moon shone through apertures where windows had once been, I never could be certain that I saw him make a positive attempt to quench his thirst from my veins, though he often hovered over the hammock.”