home. That one happens to be, as you may see by its little green
mouse-tails, a pepper-weed, {77} first cousin to the great black
pepper-bush in the gardens near by, with the berries of which you
may burn your mouth gratis.

So it is, you would find, with every weed in the little cleared
dell, some fifteen feet deep, beyond the gravel. You could not--I
certainly cannot--guess at the name, seldom at the family, of a
single plant. But I am going on too fast. What are those sticks of
wood which keep the gravel bank up? Veritable bamboos; and a
bamboo-pipe, too, is carrying the trickling cool water into the bath
close by. Surely we are in the Tropics. You hear a sudden rattle,
as of boards and brown paper, overhead, and find that it is the
clashing of the huge leaves of a young fan palm, {78a} growing not
ten feet from the window. It has no stem as yet; and the lower
leaves have to be trimmed off or they would close up the path, so
that only the great forked green butts of them are left, bound to
each other by natural matting: but overhead they range out nobly in
leafstalks ten feet long, and fans full twelve feet broad; and this
is but a baby, a three years' old thing. Surely, again, we are in
the Tropics. Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm
leaves, grows a young tree, unknown to me, looking like a walnut.
Next to it an orange, covered with long prickles and small green
fruit, its roots propped up by a semi-cylindrical balk of timber,
furry inside, which would puzzle a Hampshire woodsman; for it is,
plainly, a groo-groo or a coco-palm, split down the middle. Surely,
again, we are in the Tropics. Beyond it, again, blaze great orange
and yellow flowers, with long stamens, and pistil curving upwards
out of them. They belong to a twining, scrambling bush, with
finely-pinnated mimosa leaves. That is the 'Flower-fence,' {78b} so