o gaze at its extent. The
great hills rose sheer and rugged a mile away; the cocoanuts ceased
at a lower level, and where I stood the precipices were a mass of
wild trees, bushes, and creepers. From black to lightest green the
colors ran, from smoky crests and gloomy ravines to the stream
singing its way a hundred feet below the trail.

A hundred varieties of flowers poured forth their perfume upon the
lonely scene. The frangipani, the red jasmine of delicious odor, and
tropical gardenias, weighted the warm air with their heavy scents.

Beside the trail grew the _hutu_-tree with crimson-tasseled flowers
among broad leaves, and fruit prickly and pear-shaped. It is a fruit
not to be eaten by man, but immemorally used by lazy fishermen to
insure miraculous draughts. Streams are dammed up and the pears
thrown in. Soon the fish become stupified and float upon the surface
to the gaping nets of the poisoners. They are not hurt in flavor or
edibility.

The _keoho_, a thorny shrub, caught at my clothes as I left the trail.
Its weapons of defence serve often as pins for the native, who in
the forest improvises for himself a hat or umbrella of leaves.
Beside me, too, was the _putara_, a broad-leaved bush and the lemon
hibiscus, with its big, yellow flower, black-centered, was twisted
through these shrubs and wound about the trunk of the giant _aea_, in
whose branches the _kuku_ murmured to its mate. Often the flowering
vine stopped my progress. I struggled to free myself from its clutch
as I fought through the mass of vegetation, and pausing perforce to
let my panting lungs gulp the air, I saw around me ever new and
stranger growths--orchids, giant creepers, the _noni enata_, a small
bush with crimson pears upon it, the _toa_, or ironwood, which gave
deadly clubs in war-time, but now spread its boughs peacefully
amidst the prodigal foliage of its neighbors.

The umbrella fern, _mana-mana-hine_, was all about. The _ama_, the
candlenut-tree, shed its oily nuts on the earth. The _puu-epu_, the
paper mulberry, with yellow blossoms and cottony, round leaves,
jostled pandanus and hibiscus; the _ena-vao_, a wild ginger with
edible, but spicy, cones, and the lacebark-tree, the _faufee_, which
furnishes cordage from its bark, contested for footing in the rich
earth and fought for the sun that even on the brightest day never
reached their roots.

I staggered through the bush, falling over rotten trees and
struggling in the mass of sh