in to “look over the ground” as Bert had suggested when we were in dear old New York. Yes, dear little old New York—how I wished I were back there again.
As for rubber plantations they were there, the savage tribes of Indians were there too—I didn’t see them on the trip up stream but they were there all right just as Bert had said. There were no tigers as Bert guessed but we saw the onea, or jaguar (pronounced ja-gwar), a buff feline beast covered with black spots that is a second cousin to the tiger in both size and ferociousness.
The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with faces on them that ought to make a fellow ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and make you know that Darwin was right; boa-constrictors and seven million, more or less of other kinds of snakes were there—in fact equatorial America was all that Bert, or I, or any one else, ever dreamed it was and then multiply it by about a hundred and you will get a faint impression of it. Yes, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects end without number, and each a marvel of its kind, were there and so was the Indian princess.
