flesh afterwards. You back out,
and find that you have walked into the tips--luckily only into the
tips--of the fern-like fronds of a trailing and climbing palm such
as you see in the Botanic Gardens. That came from the East, and
furnishes the rattan-canes. This {138a} furnishes the gri-gri-
canes, and is rather worse to meet, if possible, than the rattan.
Your companion, while he helps you to pick the barbs out, calls the
palm laughingly by another name, 'Suelta-mi-Ingles'; and tells you
the old story of the Spanish soldier at San Josef. You are near the
water now; for here is a thicket of Balisiers. {138b} Push through,
under their great plantain-like leaves. Slip down the muddy bank to
that patch of gravel. See first, though, that it is not tenanted
already by a deadly Mapepire, or rattlesnake, which has not the
grace, as his cousin in North America has, to use his rattle.

The brooklet, muddy with last night's rain, is dammed and bridged by
winding roots, in shape like the jointed wooden snakes which we used
to play with as children. They belong probably to a fig, whose
trunk is somewhere up in the green cloud. Sit down on one, and
look, around and aloft. From the soil to the sky, which peeps
through here and there, the air is packed with green leaves of every
imaginable hue and shape. Round our feet are Arums, {138c} with
snow-white spadixes and hoods, one instance among many here of
brilliant colour developing itself in deep shade. But is the
darkness of the forest actually as great as it seems? Or are our
eyes, accustomed to the blaze outside, unable to expand rapidly
enough, and so liable to mistake for darkness air really full of
light reflected downward, again and again, at every angle, from the
glossy surfaces of a million leaves? At least we may be excused;
for a bat has made the same mistake, and flits past us at noonday.
And there is another--No; as it turns, a blaze of metallic azure off
the upper side of the wings proves this one to be no bat, but a
Morpho--a moth as big as a bat. And what was that second larger
flash of golden green, which dashed at the moth, and back to yonder
branch not ten feet off? A Jacamar {138d}--kingfisher, as they
miscall her here, sitting fearless of man, with the moth in her long
beak. Her throat is snowy white, her under-parts rich red brown.
Her breast, and all her upper plumage and long tail, glitter with
golden green