"This leech will suck the vein, until
From your heart's blood he gets his fill."
In answer to a query, "whether the vampire of India and that of South
America be of one species," Mr. Waterton replies, "I beg to say that I
consider them distinct species. I have never yet seen a bat from India
with a membrane rising perpendicularly from the end of its nose; nor
have I ever been able to learn that bats in India suck animals, though
I have questioned many people on this subject. I could only find two
species of bats in Guiana, with a membrane rising from the nose. Both
these kinds suck animals and eat fruit; while those bats without a
membrane on the nose seem to live entirely upon fruit and insects, but
chiefly insects. A gentleman, by name Walcott, from Barbadoes, lived
high up the river Demerara. While I was passing a day or two at his
house, the vampires sucked his son a boy of about ten or eleven years
old, some of his fowls and his jack-ass. The youth showed me his
forehead at daybreak: the wound was still bleeding apace, and I examined
it with minute attention. The poor ass was doomed to be a prey to these
sanguinary imps of night: he looked like misery steeped in vinegar.
I saw, by the numerous sores on his body, and by his apparent debility,
that he would soon sink under his afflictions. Mr. Walcott told me that
it was with the greatest difficulty he could keep a few fowls, on
account of the smaller vampire; and that the larger kind were killing
his poor ass by inches. It was the only quadruped he had brought up with
him into the forest.
"Although I was so long in Dutch Guiana and visited the Orinoco and
Cayenne, and ranged through part of the interior of Portuguese Guiana,
still I could never find out how the vampires actually draw the blood;
and, at this day, I am as ignorant of the real process as though I had
never been in th« vampire's country. I should not feel so mortified at
my total failure in attempting the discovery, had. I not made such
diligent search after the vampire, and examined its haunts. Europeans
may consider as fabulous the stories related of the vampire; but, for
my own part, I must believe in its powers of sucking blood from living
animals, as I have repeatedly seen both men and beasts which had been
sucked, and, moreover, I have examined very minutely their bleeding
wounds.
"Wishful of having it in my power to say that I had been sucked by the
vampire, and not caring for the loss of ten or twelve ounces of blood,
I frequently and designedly put myself in the way of trial. But the
vampire seemed to take a personal dislike to me; and the provoking brute
would refuse to give my clavet one solitary trial, though he would tap
the more favoured Indian's toe, in a hammock within a few yards of
mine. For the space of eleven months, I slept alone in the loft of a
woodcutter's abandoned house in the forest; and though the vampire came
in and out every night, and I had the finest opportunity of seeing him,
as the moon shone through apertures where windows had once been, I never
could be certain that I saw him make a positive attempt to quench his
thirst from my veins, though he often hovered over the hammock."
* * * * *