adily 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
fruits.

Now turn homewards, past the Rosa del monte {85b} bush (bushes, you
must recollect, are twenty feet high here), covered with crimson
roses, full of long silky crimson stamens: and then try--as we do
daily in vain--to recollect and arrange one-tenth of the things
which you have seen.

One look round at the smaller wild animals and flowers. Butterflies
swarm round us, of every hue. Beetles, you may remark, are few;
they do not run in swarms about these arid paths as they do at home.
But the wasps and bees, black and brown, are innumerable. That huge
bee in steel-blue armour, booming straight at you--whom some one
compared to the Lord Mayor's man in armour turned into a cherub, and
broken loose--(get out of his way, for he is absorbed in business)--
is probably a wood-borer, {85c} of whose work you may read in Mr.
Wood's Homes without Hands. That long black wasp, commonly called a
Jack Spaniard, builds pensile paper nests under every roof and shed.
Watch, now, this more delicate brown wasp, probably one of the
Pelopoei of whom we have read in Mr. Gosse's Naturalist in Jamaica
and Mr. Bates's Travels on the A