started from the root, twined
itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and
spreading out in all directions had covered boughs and twigs with a
foliage not their own. So far the 'vine' had done no worse than ivy does
at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether.
The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet
above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let
fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a
foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything,
formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the
branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an
ordinary swing. In three distinctly perfect instances the 'vine' had
executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the
longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap
of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree
adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable
that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I
was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig vine
threw out fine tendrils which hung downwards like strings. The strongest
among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them,
the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found
support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken
and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion
that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant
itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.

But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage
at the extreme angle of it (the old Government House before the present
fabric had been erected), where Kingsley had been the guest of Sir
Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep
verandahs lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening
out into the savannah through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos,
the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred
feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape,
peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These
bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like
of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is st