Vampire Bats

Among the products of the country around Pare, in Brazil, are vampire bats, which are so dangerous that the natives are obliged to guard carefully against their intrusion into their dwellings. A letter says that a party of Americans recently had an unpleasant experience with them. They were on an excursion up the Amazon, and at night one of them was bled so badly by a vampire as to awake, in a state of exhaustion, with a face like a corpse. The foot of his hammock and the floor beneath it was saturated with blood, the flow of which was checked with much difficulty. It is this difficulty of staunching the blood which makes the vampire so dreaded–the quantity which the creature requires to satisfy its appetite being comparatively trifling. Some persons seem to be especially liable to their attacks, while others can sleep in a room infested by them nightly with impunity. They only make their attacks in darkness, and a light kept burning in a sleeping-room is an effectual safeguard.