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Think of the agony of suffering of these children, flogged by wicked men, and even burned alive, in order to force them to tell where their parents were hidden. If those rubber-trees could only speak, what awful secrets they would reveal! Every thousand tons of rubber that have come to our own Christian land have cost seven Indian lives! Who knows, my young reader, what tragedy lies behind even the india-rubber ball with which you play so skilfully, and yet lose so carelessly!

For ten long, weary years all this went on, before we heard in England the wail of the little brown children of the Brazilian and Peruvian forests. Have the cries ceased? God only knows, for the sounds are too far away for us to catch them.

Now I want to introduce you to some more Brazilian babies, but of a very different kind. So we will leave this “Paradise of Satan,” and travel in an easterly direction, which will take us through the heart of the continent.

In the Amazon Valley there are many, many tribes of savage Indians, who hide away as we approach, thinking in their great fear that we must be rubber-gatherers. Occasionally we see a large space, where once stood an Indian village, a place of ruins and desolation, and along the tracks are human bones lying bleached and dry, telling a silent, yet eloquent story of what had been once living forms.