t of all
our 'poor relations.' Ah, when will there arise a tropic Landseer
to draw for us some of the strange fashions of the strange birds and
beasts of these lands?--to draw, for instance, the cunning, selfish,
greedy grin of delight on the face of some burly, hairy, goitred old
red Howler, as he lifts off a 'tapa del cacao de monos' (a monkey-
cacao cover), and looks defiance out of the corners of his winking
eyes at his wives and children, cousins and grandchildren, who sit
round jabbering and screeching, and, monkey fashion, twisting their
heads upside down, as they put their arms round each other's waists
to peer over each other's shoulders at the great bully, who must
feed himself first as his fee for having roared to them for an hour
at sunrise on a tree-top, while they sat on the lower branches and
looked up, trembling and delighted at the sound and fury of the
idiot sermon.

What an untried world is here for the artist of every kind, not
merely for the animal painter, for the landscape painter, for the
student of human form and attitude, if he chose to live awhile among
the still untrained Indians of the Main, or among the graceful
Coolies of Trinidad and Demerara, but also for the botanical artist,
for the man who should study long and carefully the more striking
and beautiful of these wonderful leaves and stems, flowers and
fruits, and introduce them into ornamentation, architectural or
other.

And so I end my little episode about these Lecythids, only adding
that the reader must not confound with their nuts the butter-nuts,
Caryocar, or Souari, which may be bought, I believe, at Fortnum and
Mason's, and which are of all nuts the largest and the most
delicious. They have not been found as yet in Trinidad, though they
abound in Guiana. They are the fruit also of an enormous tree
{230}--there is a young one fruiting finely in the Botanic Garden at
Port of Spain--of a quite different order; a cousin of the Matapalos
and of the Soap-berries. It carries large threefold leaves on
pointed stalks; spikes of flowers with innumerable stamens; and here
and there a fruit something like the cannon-ball, though not quite
as large. On breaking the soft rind you find it full of white meal,
probably eatable, and in the meal three or four great hard wrinkled
nuts, rounded on one side, wedge-shaped on the other, which,
cracked, are found full of almond-like white jelly, so delicious