legged plover which also breed and are at home in the tropics. The
contrasts in habits between closely allied species are wonderful.
Among the plovers and bay snipe there are species that live all the
year round in almost the same places, in tropical and subtropical
lands; and other related forms which wander over the whole earth, and
spend nearly all their time, now in the arctic and cold temperate
regions of the far north, now in the cold temperate regions of the
south. These latter wide-wandering birds of the seashore and the river
bank pass most of their lives in regions of almost perpetual sunlight.
They spend the breeding season, the northern summer, in the land of
the midnight sun, during the long arctic day. They then fly for
endless distances down across the north temperate zone, across the
equator, through the lands where the days and nights are always of
equal length, into another hemisphere, and spend another summer of
long days and long twilights in the far south, where the Antarctic
winds cool them, while their nesting home, at the other end of the
world, is shrouded beneath the iron desolation of the polar night.

In the late afternoon of the 5th we reached the quaint old-fashioned
little town of Sao Luis de Caceres, on the outermost fringe of the
settled region of the state of Matto Grosso, the last town we should
see before reaching the villages of the Amazon. As we approached we
passed half-clad black washerwomen on the river's edge. The men, with
the local band, were gathered at the steeply sloping foot of the main
street, where the steamer came to her moorings. Groups of women and
girls, white and brown, watched us from the low bluff; their skirts
and bodices were red, blue, green, of all colors. Sigg had gone ahead
with much of the baggage; he met us in an improvised motor-boat,
consisting of a dugout to the side of which he had clamped our
Evinrude motor; he was giving several of the local citizens of