usually, to add to the odd look of
the plant, all crooked, one side of the base (and that in each
species always the same side) being much larger than the other, so
that the whole head of the bush seems to have got a twist from right
to left, or left to right. Nothing can look more unlike than they
to the climbing true peppers, or even to the creeping pepper-weeds,
which abound in all waste land. But their rat-tails of small green
flowers prove them to be peppers nevertheless.

On we went, upward ever, past Cacao and Bois Immortelle orchards,
and comfortable settlers' hamlets; and now and then through a strip
of virgin forest, in which we began to see, for the first time,
though not for the last, that 'resplendent Calycophyllum' as Dr.
Krueger calls it, Chaconia as it is commonly called here, after poor
Alonzo de Chacon, the last Spanish governor of this island. It is
indeed the jewel of these woods. A low straggling tree carries, on
long pendent branches, leaves like a Spanish chestnut, a foot and
more in length; and at the ends of the branches, long corymbs of
yellow flowers. But it is not the flowers themselves which make the
glory of the tree. As the flower opens, one calyx-lobe, by a rich
vagary of nature, grows into a leaf three inches long, of a splendid
scarlet; and the whole end of each branch, for two feet or more in
length, blazes among the green foliage till you can see it and
wonder at it a quarter of a mile away. This is 'the resplendent
Calycophyllum,' elaborated, most probably, by long physical
processes of variation and natural selection into a form equally
monstrous and beautiful. There are those who will smile at my
superstition, if I state my belief that He who makes all things make
themselves may have used those very processes of variation and
natural selection for a final cause; and that the final cause was,
that He might delight Himself in the beauty of one more strange and
new creation. Be it so. I can only assume that their minds are,
for the present at least, differently constituted from mine.

We reached the head of the glen at last, and outlet from the
amphitheatre of wood there seemed none. But now I began to find out
what a tropic mountain-path can be, and what a West Indian horse can
do. We arrived at the lower end of a narrow ditch full of rocks and
mud, which wandered up the face of a hill as steep as the roofs of
the Louvre or Chateau Cha