leaves like a Mimosa-
-as the engraving shows. Up its trunk a Cereus has reared itself,
for some thirty feet at least; a climbing Seguine {83a} twines up it
with leaves like 'lords and ladies'; but the glory of the tree is
that climbing palm, the feathers of which we saw crowning it from a
distance. Up into the highest branches and down again, and up again
into the lower branches, and rolling along the ground in curves as
that of a Boa bedecked with huge ferns and prickly spikes, six feet
and more long each, the Rattan {83b} hangs in mid-air, one hardly
sees how, beautiful and wonderful, beyond what clumsy words can
tell. Beneath the great trees (for here great trees grow freely
beneath greater trees, and beneath greater trees again, delighting
in the shade) is a group of young Mangosteens, {83c} looking, to
describe the unknown by the known, like walnuts with leaflets eight
inches long, their boughs clustered with yellow and green sour
fruit; and beyond them stretches up the lawn a dense grove of
nutmegs, like Portugal laurels, hung about with olive-yellow apples.
Here and there a nutmeg-apple has split, and shows within the
delicate crimson caul of mace; or the nutmegs, the mace still
clinging round them, lie scattered on the grass. Under the
perpetual shade of the evergreens haunt Heliconias and other
delicate butterflies, who seem to dread the blaze outside, and
flutter gently from leaf to leaf, their colouring--which is usually
black with markings of orange, crimson, or blue--coming into
strongest contrast with the uniform green of leaf and grass. This
is our favourite spot for entomologising, when the sun outside
altogether forbids the least exertion. Turn, with us--alas! only in
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 ste