unserviceable to the English, were by them sold to the Venezuelanos. It must have been in revenge for my thoughts of it that the old musket nearly kicked my arm off when I attempted to shoot a tough old macaw that was perched overhead.

I shall never forget my third night with Juan Pinado. We had cooked and ate our dinner, and retired to our chinchoras and slept. At about eleven o'clock, the rain fell and put out our little fire. I covered myself with the cobija or cloak, but the rain continued pouring down my neck and up my legs. I got up and found Pinado quietly sitting on his chinchora, which he had made into a bundle. I did the same. And with our hands supporting our chins, and elbows resting on the knees, we faced each other and nodded and nodded till daybreak, the rain pouring down upon us all the time. I arrived in Maturin that evening with a roasting fever, and was laid up for three weeks insensible to everything or person around

me.

I had also the pleasure of travelling on foot to

Pun Ceres in company with another guard of the revenue, who seriously proposed to enter into copartnership with me on the following terms:— I was to import the goods, and he would secure the nonpayment of duties both to the and to the faithful servants of the customs. He would also undertake, through agents, to exchange the merchandise for tobacco, starch and corn.

government

It was, I believe, to one of the smuggling expeditions that M. Edmond as captain was recalled, when we so suddenly returned from our voyage to Buen Pastor.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE GUARAPICHE.

THE time of the year having arrived when, in these places, it is thought most favourable to clear the forest for the purpose of sowing corn; I determined to go in quest of Christobal and Domingo, who had promised to return, and to bring other labourers with them, and had taken a considerable advance in cutlasses, guns, powder, and shot, knives and clothing. For this purpose I engaged a passage at the village, in a small corial in which two men were going to Maturin. The corial was much overladen, and I was almost afraid to trust myself and my two small canisters in it. But as the men seemed confident, and I have always allowed every man to know his own business best, I was reassured; and so shaking hands with the alcalde or jefe politico as he was usually called, Don Mexia, I entered and we started.

That afternoon we stopped at the first cornuca, the next one being quite a day's journey off. The proprietors were a very respectable family of Spanish blood, unmixed with Indian. My fellow passengers seemed quite at home, which might arise from the intimacy of frequent calls as they passed up and down the river, or from a sense of independence arising from the ease of making a living here, and the republican nature of the government. I perceived the same free-and-easy way of intercourse between people of dissimilar stations, in the United States of North America.

A cornuca, perhaps a contraction for cornucopia, is a farm on which provisions are grown, and pigs and poultry raised. A hacienda is a cane, cacao and coffee plantation, with factory and machinery for the manufacture of sugar, chocolate and coffee; the latter two articles being chiefly prepared and sent out in the berry state. A hato is an extensive cattle farm.

The second night we stopped at a new cornuca, the owners of which, man and wife and his sister, were old acquaintances of mine in the Caña. They

were, like Christobal and Domingo, Chaima Indians, the most civilized of all the Indians I have seen to this day. Generally, they are as fair in complexion as the offspring of European and Arawak parents, sometimes fairer, well formed in every part, and known to strangers as Indians only by their own declaration, and by a more subdued manner than that of Creole Spaniards. The majority of the population of Pun Ceres, including the rivers tributary to the Gran Lago, and to Rio San Juan, are of this tribe. I can attribute their advanced state only to the care of the Roman missionaries in the days of the Spanish dominion, improved and strengthened by their commercial association with the citizens of Maturin and Cumana.

The rancheria of my Chaima friends in their new cornuca was of the usual kind, and very commodious, with sleeping apartments for the family. The assistant labourers and strangers, as usual, slung their chinchoras in the open part of the building.

The river here runs with great force, there