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145 hollow impostor crashing to the ground, and a hundred rivals will fight for its share of the sunlight.

I must own that it was a very great disappointment to me never once to catch sight of a monkey; their cry was often to be heard in the surrounding forest, and they were especially noisy about sunset; but they have become shy of the neighbourhood of clearings, and I could not bear the heat and toil of a scramble through the thick and thorny undergrowth to reach a spot from which they could be seen. However, one's eyes never failed to find animals and insects well worth the watching, and, amongst them all, the parasol-ants were perhaps the most fascinating, as they passed along their well-worn tracks, each with a piece of green leaf or coloured flower about the size of a threepenny-bit held over its head. I had read Mr. Belt's interesting description of their habits, and had learned how the leaves they so carefully cut from the trees are stored in subterranean galleries and used to form a sort of mushroom bed on which to grow the fungus which forms their principal food. We traced one of their pathways for some distance through the undergrowth until we reached their nest, a low mound three or four yards across, formed of the earth which had been thrown out when digging the galleries beneath, and a few blows on the ground with a stick soon brought out the fierce-looking hall-porters who guard the mouth of the burrows. My husband had on one occasion to place his camera on the top of one of these nests, as the only place from which a certain view could be taken. Going about his work as quietly as possible, he managed to get the focus adjusted before his presence was discovered, but whilst he was putting in the slide the ants swarmed up over him. He jumped away as soon as the plate had been exposed, and managed to brush them off his neck and hands, but fifty or sixty of the ants had fixed their strong nippers into the flannel of his shirt and trousers and refused to be shaken from their hold, and when he attempted to pull them off, the small body always came away between his thumb and finger, leaving the big head and nippers still fast to the flannel.

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Note (by A. P. M.).—This was my fourth visit to the ruins of Quirigua. It was here that in 1881 I first made acquaintance with American antiquities. A native from the village guided me to the site of the ruins, but the undergrowth was so dense that we had some difficulty in finding any of the monuments, and even when within touch of them, so thickly were they covered with creepers, ferns, and moss, that it was not easy to distinguish them from dead tree-trunks. When the creepers and larger plants had been cleared off, the thick growth of moss still obscured the carving, and as we had come totally unprepared to meet this difficulty, some time was occupied in improvising scrubbing-brushes from bundles of the wiry midribs of palm-