Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/149

Rh The man poled the boat up the lagoon, disturbing hundreds of snipe and sandpipers, to a point where the stream narrowed, and where the mangroves reached even to the water's edge, forming solid green walls, with the placid water between them. These trees were dotted with white herons and cormorants, and at a place where there was a spring,—a spring of fresh water bubbling up in this salt water lagoon,—we put up a hundred ducks and two dozen spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) which were roosting on the trees.

Having shot some of these birds we tried to land, but the mud was so soft, and we sank so deep, that it was impossible, and we were obliged to leave them. Quitting the main channel, we entered a narrow water lane, where many egrets and night-herons, with broad boat-bills, flapped across our bows. The mangroves were in bloom, the small concealed flower being hardly perceptible. At last we reached the point where the flamingoes ought to have been, but where they were not,—a broad mud flat, where they always had fed till that day. Disappointed, we turned the boat about, after causing it to be pushed over the mud as far as possible, and returned.

The sun was down then, and the water smoother, and all the little water birds and the greater ibis and herons were going to roost, some on the sand-bars, others on the trees. Our dinner, when we reached the hut, was the same as our breakfast,—a large broiled fish, laid out on a palmetto fan, which we ate by the light of an attenuated candle, stuck near by on a metate table. The interior of the hut was black with smoke, dried fish were stuck up all about, nets and other paraphernalia of a fisher's hut hung in the corners, and one end was filled by a great pile