and sharp enough to cut clothes, skin, and flesh to ribands,
if it is brushed in the direction of the leaves. For shape and
colour, few plants would look more lovely in a hothouse; but it
would soon need to be confined in a den by itself, like a jaguar or
an alligator.

Here, too, we saw a beautiful object, which was seen again more than
once about the high woods; a large flower, {162b} spreading its five
flat orange-scarlet lobes round yellow bells. It grows in little
bunches, in the axils of pairs of fleshy leaves, on a climbing vine.
When plucked, a milky sap exudes from it. It is a cousin of our
periwinkles, and cousin, too, of the Thevetia, which we saw at St.
Thomas's, and of the yellow Allamandas which ornament hothouses at
home, as this, and others of its family, especially the yellow
Odontadenia, surely ought to do. There are many species of the
family about, and all beautiful.

We passed too, in the path, an object curious enough, if not
beautiful. Up a smooth stem ran a little rib, seemingly of earth
and dead wood, almost straight, and about half an inch across,
leading to a great brown lump among the branches, as big as a bushel
basket. We broke it open, and found it a covered gallery, swarming
with life. Brown ant-like creatures, white maggot-like creatures,
of several shapes and sizes, were hurrying up and down, as busy as
human beings in Cheapside. They were Termites, 'white ants'--of
which of the many species I know not--and the lump above was their
nest. But why they should find it wisest to perch their nest aloft
is as difficult to guess, as to guess why they take the trouble to
build this gallery up to it, instead of walking up the stem in the
open air. It may be that they are afraid of birds. It may be, too,
that they actually dislike the light. At all events, the majority
of them--the workers and soldiers, I believe, without exception--are
blind, and do all their work by an intensely developed sense of
touch, and it may be of smell and hearing also. Be that as it may,
we should have seen them, had we had time to wait, repair the breach
in their gallery, with as much discipline and division of labour as
average human workers in a manufactory, before the business of food-
getting was resumed.

We hurried on along the trace, which now sloped rapidly downhill.
Suddenly, a loathsome smell defiled the air. Was there a gas-house
in the wilderness? Or h