We waded stream after stream under the bamboo clumps, and in one of them we saw swimming a green rigoise, or whip-snake, which must have been nearly ten feet long.  It swam with its head and the first two feet of its body curved aloft like a swan, while the rest of the body lay along the surface of the water in many curves—­a most graceful object as it glided away into dark shadow along an oily pool.  At last we reached an outlying camp, belonging to one of our party who was superintending the making of new roads in that quarter, and there rested our weary limbs, some in hammock, some on the tables, some, again, on the clay floor.  Here I saw, as I saw every ten minutes, something new—­that quaint vegetable plaything described by Humboldt and others; namely, the spathe of the Timit palm.  It encloses, as in most palms, a branched spadix covered with innumerable round buds, most like a head of millet, two feet and a half long:  but the spathe, instead of splitting and forming a hood over the flowers, as in the Cocorite and most palms, remains entire, and slips off like the finger of a glove.  When slipped off, it is found to be made of two transverse layers of fibre—­a bit of veritable natural lace, similar to, though far less delicate than, the famous lace-bark of the Lagetta-tree, peculiar, I believe, to one district in the Jamaica mountains.  And as it is elastic and easily stretched, what hinders the brown child from pulling it out till it makes an admirable fool’s cap, some two feet high, and exactly the colour of his own skin, and dancing about therein, the fat oily little Cupidon, without a particle of clothing beside?  And what wonder if we grown-up whites made fools’ caps too, for children on the other side of the Atlantic?  During which process we found—­ what all said they had never seen before—­that one of the spadices carried two caps, one inside the other, and one exactly like the other; a wanton superfluity of Nature, which I should like to hear explained by some morphologist.

We rode away from that hospitable group of huts, whither we were to return in two or three days; and along the green trace once more.  As we rode, M—–­ the civiliser of Montserrat and I side by side, talking of Cuba, and staring at the Noranteas overhead, a dull sound was heard, as if the earth had opened; as indeed it had, engulfing in the mud the whole forehand of M—–­’s mule; and there he knelt, his beard outspread upon the clay, while the mule’s visage looked patiently out from under his left arm.  However, it was soft falling there.  The mule was hauled out by main force.  As for cleaning either her or the rider, that was not thought of in a country where they were sure to be as dirty as ever in an hour; and so we rode on, after taking a note of the spot, and, as it happened, forgetting it again—­one of us at least.