leap fell short of the mark and he landed headlong among some bushes, kicking violently as I came up to him.  As he seemed strongly built and had a rather savage expression, it did not seem wise to tackle him with bare hands, therefore, as I desired to get him alive, I ran back and procured my focussing cloth, which I tied around his head.  Thus I got him safely back to the camp, where he was tied to a board and the bullets extracted from his flesh.  Then his wounds, which were not serious, were bound up and he was put into a cage with a bunch of bananas and a saucer of goat’s milk to cheer him up a bit.

The suddenness with which these monkey delicacies disappeared, convinced me that his complete recovery was a matter of only a short time, unless perchance some hungry rubber-worker, surreptitiously, had removed these viands while nobody was looking, for bananas and milk are things which will tempt any Amazonian from the narrow path of rectitude; but it was not so in this case.  The conviction as to recovery proved right, and with the improvement of his health he displayed a cheerful and fond disposition that decided me to take him back with me to New York when I should go.  I have since been informed that he belonged to the Humboldt Sika species.  I watched him for several months and came to like him for the innocent tricks he never tired of playing.  One night he managed to liberate himself from the tree near the hut where he was tied.  He disappeared for two days, but on the third he returned, chains and all.  He had doubtless found life in the jungle trees not altogether cheerful with a heavy chain secured to his waist, and he had returned reconciled to captivity and regular meals.  There is at present one specimen of this kind of monkey at the Bronx Zooelogical Gardens in charge of the head keeper.

At the time of low water, the so-called prayas appear at the bends of the river; they grow with the accumulation of sand and mud.  They are wide and often of a considerable area, and on them the alligators like to bask in the sunshine of early morning and late afternoon, and the tartarugas, or fresh-water turtles, lay their eggs.  These eggs are laid in the months of September and October on moon-lit nights and are somewhat smaller than the ordinary hen’s egg, the yolk tasting very much the same, but they are covered with a tough parchment-like shell.  Here on the upper Amazon the people prepare a favourite meal by collecting these eggs and storing them for two or three weeks, when they tear open the shell and squeeze out the yolks, mixing them all up into a mush with the inevitable farinha.  Few people, except native Brazilians, ever acquire a relish for this remarkable dish.

I spent a whole day waiting for the elusive alligators on one of these sand-bars, but evidently they were too wise, for they never came within camera-range.  I did, however, see some tapir-tracks, leading down to the water’s edge.  After the long wait I grew discouraged, and chose a camping place farther up the river, where I prepared a meal consisting of turtle eggs and river water.  The meal was not absolutely undisturbed, as the air was full of a species of fly that derives its principal sustenance from the bodies of various dead animals always to be found through the jungle, whose teeming life crowds out all but those fittest to survive.