fancy--out of the grove into a neighbouring path, between tea-
shrubs, looking like privets with large myrtle flowers, and young
clove-trees, covered with the groups of green buds which are the
cloves of commerce; and among fruit-trees from every part of the
Tropics, with the names of which I will not burden you. Glance at
that beautiful and most poisonous shrub, which we found wild at St.
Thomas's. {84} Glance, too--but, again why burden you with names
which you will not recollect, much more with descriptions which do
not describe? Look, though, down that Allspice avenue, at the clear
warm light which is reflected off the smooth yellow ever-peeling
stems; and then, if you can fix your eye steadily on any object,
where all are equally new and strange, look at this stately tree. A
bough has been broken off high up, and from the wounded spot two
plants are already contending. One is a parasitic Orchis; the other
a parasite of a more dangerous family. It looks like a straggling
Magnolia, some two feet high. In fifty years it will be a stately
tree. Look at the single long straight air-root which it is letting
down by the side of the tree bole. That root, if left, will be the
destroyer of the whole tree. It will touch the earth, take root
below, send out side-fibres above, call down younger roots to help
it, till the whole bole, clasped and stifled in their embraces, dies
and rots out, and the Matapalo (or Scotch attorney, {85a} as it is
rudely called here) stands alone on stilted roots, and board walls
of young wood, slowly coalescing into one great trunk; master of the
soil once owned by the patron on whose vitals he has fed: a
treacherous tyrant; and yet, like many another treacherous tyrant,
beautiful to see, with his shining evergreen foliage, and grand
labyrinth of smooth roots, standing high in air, or dangling from
the boughs in search of soil below; and last, but not least, his
Magnolia-like flowers, rosy or snowy-white, and green egg-shaped