Step a few paces aside and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora behind
it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now lie on the
ground in sad confusion, one upon the other, all shattered and fungus-grown
and a prey to millions of insects which are busily employed in destroying
them. One branch of it still looks healthy! Will it recover? No, it cannot;
Nature has already run her course, and that healthy-looking branch is only
as a fallacious good symptom in him who is just about to die of a
mortification when he feels no more pain, and fancies his distemper has
left him; it is as the momentary gleam of a wintry sun's ray close to the
western horizon. See! while we are speaking a gust of wind has brought the
tree to the ground and made room for its successor.

Come farther on and examine that apparently luxuriant tauronira on thy
right hand. It boasts a verdure not its own; they are false ornaments it
wears. The bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the root to its
topmost branch. The succession of fruit which it hath borne, like good
cheer in the houses of the great, has invited the birds to resort to it,
and they have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants on its
branches which, like the distempers vice brings into the human frame, rob
it of all its health and vigour. They have shortened its days, and probably
in another year they will finally kill it, long before Nature intended that
it should die.

Ere thou leavest this interesting scene, look on the ground around thee,
and see what everything here below must come to.

Behold that newly-fallen wallaba! The whirlwind has uprooted it in its
prime, and it has brought down to the ground a dozen small ones in its
fall. Its bark has already begun to drop off! And that heart of mora close
by it is fast yielding, in spite of its firm, tough texture.