bunches; corollas, longer than those of our foxglove, sometimes yellow or sometimes purple, load the arborescent bignonias; while the chorisias are covered, as it were, with lilies, only their colours are richer and more varied; grasses also appear in form of bamboos, as the most graceful of trees; bauhinias, bignonias, and aroideous plants cling round the trees like enormous cables; orchideous plants and bromelias overrun their limbs, or fasten themselves to them when prostrated by the storm, and make even their dead remains become verdant with leaves and flowers not their own.’”

Though he could read very well, Charlie had, so far, rather stumbled through the long names in this description, but he finished off with fluency, not to say enthusiasm. “’Such are the ancient forests, flourishing in a damp and fertile soil, and clothed with perpetual green.’”

I was half-way through a profound sigh when I caught the school-master’s eye, who had paused in his plan-making and was listening with his head upon his hand.

“What a groan!” he exclaimed.  “What’s the matter?”

“It sounds so splendid!” I answered, “and I’m so afraid I shall never see it.  I told Father last night I should like to be a sailor, but he only said ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ and that there was a better berth waiting for me in Uncle Henry’s office than any of the Queen’s ships would provide for me; and Mother begged me never to talk of it any more, if I didn’t want to break her heart”—­and I sighed again.

The school-master had a long smooth face, which looked longer from melancholy, and he turned it and his arms over the back of the chair, and looked at me with the watchful listening look his eyes always had; but I am not sure if he was really paying much attention to me, for he talked (as he often did) as if he were talking to himself.

“I wanted to be a soldier,” he said, “and my father wouldn’t let me.  I often used to wish I had run away and enlisted, when I was with Quarter-master McCulloch, of the Engineers (he’d risen from the ranks and was younger than me), in Bermuda.”

“Bermuda!  That’s not very far from South America, is it?” said I, looking across to the big map of the world.  “Is it very beautiful, too?”

The school-master’s eyes contracted as if he were short-sighted, or looking at something inside his own head.  But he smiled as he answered—­

“The poet says,

     ’A pleasing land of drowsy-head it is,
      Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
      And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
      For ever flushing round a summer sky.’”

“But are there any curious beasts and plants and that sort of thing?” I asked.

“I believe there were no native animals originally,” said the school-master.  “I mean inland ones.  But the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea are of all lovely forms and colours.  And such corals and sponges, and sea-anemones, blooming like flowers in the transparent pools of the warm blue water that washes the coral reefs and fills the little creeks and bays!”