At last the truck stopped at a manager’s house with a Palmiste, {124} or cabbage-palm, on each side of the garden gate, a pair of columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments for his lawn.  It is the fashion here, and a good fashion it is, to leave the Palmistes, a few at least, when the land is cleared; or to plant them near the house, merely on account of their wonderful beauty.  One Palmiste was pointed out to me, in a field near the road, which had been measured by its shadow at noon, and found to be one hundred and fifty-three feet in height.  For more than a hundred feet the stem rose straight, smooth, and gray.  Then three or four spathes of flowers, four or five feet long each, jutted out and upward like; while from below them, as usual, one dead leaf, twenty feet long or more, dangled head downwards in the breeze.  Above them rose, as always, the green portion of the stem for some twenty feet; and then the flat crown of feathers, as dark as yew, spread out against the blue sky, looking small enough up there, though forty feet at least in breadth.  No wonder if the man who possessed such a glorious object dared not destroy it, though he spared it for a different reason from that for which the Negroes spare, whenever they can, the gigantic Ceibas, or silk cotton trees.  These latter are useless as timber; and their roots are, of course, hurtful to the canes.  But the Negro is shy of felling the Ceiba.  It is a magic tree, haunted by spirits.  There are ‘too much jumbies in him,’ the Negro says; and of those who dare to cut him down some one will die, or come to harm, within the year.  In Jamaica, says my friend Mr. Gosse, ’they believe that if a person throws a stone at the trunk, he will be visited with sickness, or other misfortune.  When they intend to cut one down, they first pour rum at the root as a propitiatory offering.’  The Jamaica Negro, however, fells them for canoes, the wood being soft, and easily hollowed.  But here, as in Demerara, the trees are left standing about in cane-pieces and pastures to decay into awful and fantastic shapes, with prickly spurs and board-walls of roots, high enough to make a house among them simply by roofing them in; and a flat crown of boughs, some seventy or eighty feet above the ground, each bough as big as an average English tree, from which dangles a whole world, of lianes, matapalos, orchids, wild pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least, that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid’s hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus—­a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough, it has been discovered in Angola—­the only species of the Cactus tribe in the Old World.