of the Northern Mountain. The
reader must fancy for himself the loveliest brook which he ever saw
in Devonshire or Yorkshire, Ireland or Scotland; crystal-clear,
bedded with gray pebbles, broken into rapids by rock-ledges or great
white quartz boulders, swirling under steep cliffs, winding through
flats of natural meadow and copse. Then let him transport his
stream into the great Palm-house at Kew, stretch out the house up
hill and down dale, five miles in length and two thousand feet in
height; pour down on it from above a blaze which lights up every
leaf into a gem, and deepens every shadow into blackness, and yet
that very blackness full of inner light--and if his fancy can do as
much as that, he can imagine to himself the stream up which we rode
or walked, now winding along the narrow track a hundred feet or two
above, looking down on the upper surface of the forest, on the
crests of palms, and the broad sheets of the balisier copse, and
often on the statelier fronds of true bananas, which had run wild
along the stream-side, flowering and fruiting in the wilderness for
the benefit of the parrots and agoutis; or on huge dark clumps of
bamboo, which (probably not indigenous to the island) have in like
manner spread themselves along all the streams in the lapse of ages.

Now we scrambled down into the brook, and waded our horses through,
amid shoals of the little spotted sardine, {218a} who are too
fearless, or too unaccustomed to man, to get out of the way more
than a foot or two. But near akin as they are to the trout, they
are still nearer to the terrible Pirai, {218b} of the Orinocquan
waters, the larger of which snap off the legs of swimming ducks and
the fingers of unwary boatmen, while the smaller surround the rash
bather, and devour him piecemeal till he drowns, torn by a thousand
tiny wounds, in water purpled with his own blood. These little
fellows prove their kindred with the Pirai by merely nibbling at the
bather's skin, making him tingle from head to foot, while he thanks
Heaven that his visitors are but two inches, and not a foot in
length.

At last we stopped for breakfast. The horses were tethered to a
tree, the food got out, and we sat down on a pebbly beach after a
bathe in a deep pool, so clear that it looked but four feet deep,
though the bathers soon found it to be eight and more. A few dark
logs, as usual, were lodged at the bottom, looking suspiciously l