the glen, towering with upright but branching limbs, and huge crown,
thinly leaved, double the height of all the trees around? An ash?
Something like an ash in growth; but when you look at it through the
glasses (indispensable in the tropic forest), you see that the
foliage is more like that of the yellow horse-chestnut. And no
British ash, not even the Altyre giants, ever reached to half that
bulk. It is a Silk-cotton tree; a Ceiba {79d}--say, rather, the
Ceiba of the glen; for these glens have a habit of holding each one
great Ceiba, which has taken its stand at the upper end, just where
the mountain-spurs run together in an amphitheatre; and being
favoured (it may be supposed) by the special richness of the down-
washed soil at that spot, grows to one of those vast air-gardens of
creepers and parasites of which we have so often read and dreamed.
Such a one is this: but we will not go up to it now. This sketch
shall be completed by the background of green and gray, fading aloft
into tender cobalt: the background of mountain, ribbed and gullied
into sharpest slopes by the tropic rains, yet showing, even where
steepest, never a face of rock, or a crag peeping through the trees.
Up to the sky-line, a thousand feet aloft, all is green; and that,
instead of being, as in Europe, stone or moor, is jagged and
feathered with gigantic trees. How rich! you would say. Yet these
West Indians only mourn over its desolation and disfigurement; and
point to the sheets of gray stems, which hang like mist along the
upper slopes. They look to us, on this 30th of December, only as
April signs that the woodlands have not quite burst into full leaf.
But to the inhabitants they are tokens of those fearful fires which
raged over the island during the long drought of this summer; when
the forests were burning for a whole month, and this house scarcely
saved; when whole cane-fields, mills, dwelling-houses, went up as
tinder and flame in a moment, and the smoky haze from the burning