during
the rainy season fills its muddy banks to the brink. These lower coast
forests abound in gigantic trees, whose fruits are only accessible to
the winged and four-handed denizens of the forest, but farther up the
river-shores are lined for miles with a dense growth of wild-growing
plantains, of which the natives distinguish four varieties under as
many different names. The fruit of the largest, the _cuernavacas_
("cow-horns"), attains a weight of seven pounds, and resembles in shape
the crooked pod of the tamarind rather than the cucumber-shaped little
bananas which reach our Northern markets. They ripen very slowly, and
often rot on the tree before they become eatable, but the Mexicans
cure them over a slow fire of embers and green brushwood, after which
their taste can hardly be distinguished from that of the finest
yellow bananas. Palm-trees mingle here with the massive stems of the
cottonwoods, talipot-palms, and the _Palma prieta_, whose nut might
become a profitable article of export, having a close resemblance to a
filbert. The plum-clusters of the mango can only be reached by a bold
climber, as the trunk rises like a mast, often perfectly free from
branches for eighty or ninety feet, and the chief beneficiaries of
this region are still the macaws and squirrel-monkeys; but farther
up Pomona becomes more condescending, and the ancient Gymnosophists,
whose religion restricted true believers to a diet of wild-growing
tree-fruits, would have found their fittest home in the terrace-land
between the lower twenty miles of the Rio Verde and the foot-hills of
the Sierra de San Miguel.

Plum-bearing bushes abound from June to September with red, yellow,
and wax-colored fruit; the _morus_, or wild mulberry-tree, literally
covers the ground with its dark, honey-sweet berries; the crown of the
pino-palm is loaded with grape-like clusters, which, struck by a cudgel,
discharge a shower of rich acorn-shaped nuts; guavas, alligator-pears,
mamayos, chirimoyas, and wild oranges display flowers and fruit at the
same time, and under the alternate influence of heat and moisture
produce their perennial crops with unfailing regularity; the algarobe
(_Mimosa siliqua_), a species of mezquite not larger than an apple-tree,
yields half a ton of the edible pods known as carob-beans or St. John's
bread; the figs of the gigantic banyan-tree furnish an aromatic syrup;
the trunks of the _Robinia viridis_ exude an edible gum; and from
the