as curiosities, the smaller but
intensely hard Letter wood, {133o} Lignum vitae, {133p} and Purple
heart. {134a} He will pass by as useless weeds, Ceibas {134b} and
Sandbox-trees, {134c} whose bulk appals you. He will look up, with
something like a malediction, at the Matapalos, which, every fifty
yards, have seized on mighty trees, and are enjoying, I presume,
every different stage of the strangling art, from the baby Matapalo,
who, like the one which you saw in the Botanic Garden, has let down
his first air-root along his victim's stem, to the old sinner whose
dark crown of leaves is supported, eighty feet in air, on
innumerable branching columns of every size, cross-clasped to each
other by transverse bars. The giant tree on which his seed first
fell has rotted away utterly, and he stands in its place, prospering
in his wickedness, like certain folk whom David knew too well. Your
guide walks on with a sneer. But he stops with a smile of
satisfaction as he sees lying on the ground dark green glossy
leaves, which are fading into a bright crimson; for overhead
somewhere there must be a Balata, {134d} the king of the forest; and
there, close by, is his stem--a madder-brown column, whose head may
be a hundred and fifty feet or more aloft. The forester pats the
sides of his favourite tree, as a breeder might that of his
favourite racehorse. He goes on to evince his affection, in the
fashion of West Indians, by giving it a chop with his cutlass; but
not in wantonness. He wishes to show you the hidden virtues of this
(in his eyes) noblest of trees--how there issues out swiftly from
the wound a flow of thick white milk, which will congeal, in an
hour's time, into a gum intermediate in its properties between
caoutchouc and gutta-percha. He talks of a time when the English
gutta-percha market shall be supplied from the Balatas of the
northern hills, which cannot be shipped away as timber. He tells
you how the tree is a tree of a generous, virtuous, and elaborate
race--'a tree of God, which is full of sap,' as one said of old of
such--and what could he say better, less or more? For it is a
Sapota, cousin to the Sapodilla, and other excellent fruit-trees,
itself most excellent even in its fruit-bearing power; for every
five years it is covered with such a crop of delicious plums, that
the lazy Negro thinks it worth his while to spend days of hard work,
besides incurring the penalty