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196 savage animals are rarely inclined to molest human beings unless provoked; and the immunity which he enjoyed from the attacks certainly confirmed his views. After long wandering in this way, he was fortunate in finding some Indians and soldiers whom the Portuguese commander had sent into a space in the forest to build a canoe. They had just finished it; but the soldier who commanded the rest said he dared not on any account convey a stranger to the fort; but he added as there were two canoes, one of them might be dispatched with a letter, and then the stranger could proceed slowly on in the other. In this way they travelled for four days, when the first canoe which had gone on with the letter met them with the commander's answer. During its absence, the nights had been cold and stormy, the rain had fallen in torrents, the days were cloudy, and there had been no sun to dry the wet hammocks. Exposed thus day and night to the chilling blast and pelting shower, Mr. Waterton's health gave way, and a severe fever came on. The commander's answer was a refusal to allow any stranger to cross the frontier; but upon a second message being taken to him, informing him of the traveller's dangerous condition, he ordered him to be removed to the fort, where the stranger was eventually treated with much kindness.

This journey was successful in procuring samples of the singular poison called Wourali, of which so many half fabulous stories were told, Mr. Waterton found it a preparation from a kind of vine, growing in those wilds, with the addition of pounded fangs of the Labarri snake, and other strange ingredients mingled together by a slow and tedious process; with this poison, the Indians