Mrs. Cherrie had accompanied him during two or
three years of their early married life in his collecting trips along
the Orinoco. Their second child was born when they were in camp a
couple of hundred miles from any white man or woman. One night a few
weeks later they were obliged to leave a camping-place, where they had
intended to spend the night, because the baby was fretful, and its
cries attracted a jaguar, which prowled nearer and nearer in the
twilight until they thought it safest once more to put out into the
open river and seek a new resting-place. Cherrie had spent about
twenty-two years collecting in the American tropics. Like most of the
field-naturalists I have met, he was an unusually efficient and
fearless man; and willy-nilly he had been forced at times to vary his
career by taking part in insurrections. Twice he had been behind the
bars in consequence, on one occasion spending three months in a prison
of a certain South American state, expecting each day to be taken out
and shot. In another state he had, as an interlude to his
ornithological pursuits, followed the career of a gun-runner, acting
as such off and on for two and a half years. The particular
revolutionary chief whose fortunes he was following finally came into
power, and Cherrie immortalized his name by naming a new species of
ant-thrush after him--a delightful touch, in its practical combination
of those not normally kindred pursuits, ornithology and gun-running.
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