logs, which floods had carried from the hills above, and ate and drank—­ for our Negroes had by now rejoined us; and then scrambled up the shore back again, and into a trace running along the low cliff, even more beautiful, if possible, than that which we had followed in the morning.  Along the cliff tall Balatas and Palmistes, with here and there an equally tall Cedar, and on the inside bank a green wall of Balisiers, with leaves full fifteen feet long and heads of scarlet flowers, marked the richness of the soil.  Here and there, too, a Cannon-ball tree rose, grand and strange, among the Balatas; and in one place the ground was strewn with large white flowers, whose peculiar shape told us at once of some other Lecythid tree high overhead.  These Lecythids are peculiar to the hottest parts of South America; to the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon; to Trinidad, as a fragment of the old Orinocquan land, and possibly to some of the southern Antilles.  So now, as we are in their home, it may be worth our while to pause a little round these strange and noble forms.

Botanists tell us that they are, or rather may have been in old times, akin to myrtles.  If so, they have taken a grand and original line of their own, and persevered in it for ages, till they have specialised themselves to a condition far in advance of most myrtles, in size, beauty, and use.  They may be known from all other trees by one mark—­their large handsome flowers.  A group of the innumerable stamens have grown together on one side of the flower into a hood, which bends over the stigma and the other stamens.  Tall trees they are, and glorious to behold, when in full flower; but they are notorious mostly for their huge fruits and delicious nuts.  One of their finest forms, and the only one which the traveller is likely to see often in Trinidad, is the Cannon-ball tree. {227} There is a grand specimen in the Botanic Garden; and several may be met with in any day’s ride through the high woods, and distinguished at once from any other tree.  The stem rises, without a fork, for sixty feet or more, and rolls out at the top into a head very like that of an elm trimmed up, and like an elm too in its lateral water-boughs.  For the whole of the stem, from the very ground to the forks, and the larger fork-branches likewise, are feathered all over with numberless short prickly pendent branchlets, which roll outward, and then down, and then up again in graceful curves, and carry large pale crimson flowers, each with a pink hood in the middle, looking like a new-born baby’s fist.  Those flowers, when torn, turn blue on exposure to the light; and when they fall, leave behind them the cannon-ball, a rough brown globe, as big as a thirty two pound shot, which you must get down with a certain caution, lest that befall you which befell a certain gallant officer on the mainland of America.  For, fired with a post-prandial ambition to obtain a cannon ball, he took to himself a long bamboo, and poked at the tree.  He succeeded:  but not altogether as he had hoped.  For the cannon ball, in coming down, avenged itself by dropping exactly on the bridge of his nose, felling him to the ground, and giving him such a pair of black eyes that he was not seen on parade for a fortnight.