not burden you.  Glance at that beautiful and most poisonous shrub, which we found wild at St. Thomas’s. {84} Glance, too—­but, again why burden you with names which you will not recollect, much more with descriptions which do not describe?  Look, though, down that Allspice avenue, at the clear warm light which is reflected off the smooth yellow ever-peeling stems; and then, if you can fix your eye steadily on any object, where all are equally new and strange, look at this stately tree.  A bough has been broken off high up, and from the wounded spot two plants are already contending.  One is a parasitic Orchis; the other a parasite of a more dangerous family.  It looks like a straggling Magnolia, some two feet high.  In fifty years it will be a stately tree.  Look at the single long straight air-root which it is letting down by the side of the tree bole.  That root, if left, will be the destroyer of the whole tree.  It will touch the earth, take root below, send out side-fibres above, call down younger roots to help it, till the whole bole, clasped and stifled in their embraces, dies and rots out, and the Matapalo (or Scotch attorney, {85a} as it is rudely called here) stands alone on stilted roots, and board walls of young wood, slowly coalescing into one great trunk; master of the soil once owned by the patron on whose vitals he has fed:  a treacherous tyrant; and yet, like many another treacherous tyrant, beautiful to see, with his shining evergreen foliage, and grand labyrinth of smooth roots, standing high in air, or dangling from the boughs in search of soil below; and last, but not least, his Magnolia-like flowers, rosy or snowy-white, and green egg-shaped fruits.

Now turn homewards, past the Rosa del monte {85b} bush (bushes, you must recollect, are twenty feet high here), covered with crimson roses, full of long silky crimson stamens:  and then try—­as we do daily in vain—­to recollect and arrange one-tenth of the things which you have seen.

One look round at the smaller wild animals and flowers.  Butterflies swarm round us, of every hue.  Beetles, you may remark, are few; they do not run in swarms about these arid paths as they do at home.  But the wasps and bees, black and brown, are innumerable.  That huge bee in steel-blue armour, booming straight at you—­whom some one compared to the Lord Mayor’s man in armour turned into a cherub, and broken loose—­(get out of his way, for he is absorbed in business)—­ is probably a wood-borer, {85c} of whose work you may read in Mr. Wood’s Homes without Hands.  That long black wasp, commonly called a Jack Spaniard, builds pensile paper nests under every roof and shed.  Watch, now, this more delicate brown wasp, probably one of the Pelopoei of whom we have read in Mr. Gosse’s Naturalist in Jamaica and Mr. Bates’s Travels on the Amazons.  She has made under a shelf a mud nest of three long cells, and filled them one