noco or the Carony, and the long seeds of the | This was the home of the lord of the cove, a mangrove, in shape like a roach-fisher's float, gallant red-bearded Scotsman, with a head and already germinating, their leaves showing at the upper end, a tiny root at the lower. In that shingle they will not take root; but they are quite ready to go to sea again next tide, and wander on for weeks, and for hundreds of miles, till they run ashore at last on a congenial bed of mud, throw out spider legs right and left, and hide the foul mire with their gay green leaves.

On a little strip of flat ground behind the beach stood a three-roomed cottage-of course on stilts-a shed which serves as a kitchen, and a third ruined building tenanted mostly by lizards and creeping flowers.

and a heart, his handsome Creole wife, and lovely brownish children, with no more clothes on than they could help. At this hospitable and secluded home Mr. Kingsley passed the night, and, as often happens in the tropics, his slumbers were not altogether undisturbed, for shortly after he had become unconscious of the chorus of toads and cicadas his hammock came down by the head. Next there rushed down the mountain a storm of wind and rain, which made the cocoa leaves flap and creak and rattle against the gable of the house, and set every door and window banging till they were

THE HIGH WOODS.

In the morning early he rowed away again, full of longing, but not of hope, of reaching one or other of the guacharo caves; but the tumbling swells coming in from the outer sea precluded all chance of entering a cave, and he was forced to row away with wistful eyes, and leave the guacharo in undisturbed repose. These birds are nocturnal in their habits, trooping forth from their seabound homes especially on moonlight nights to feed on peculiar kinds of nuts and fruits. They are very difficult to capture, and when once secured, rarely live away from their natural haunts.

caught and brought to reason. And be- vines, and branches high above your head. tween the howls of the wind he became But try to walk through it, and ten steps aware of a strange noise from seaward-a undeceive you. Around your knees are booming, or rather humming, most like that probably mamures, with creeping stems and which a locomotive sometimes makes when fan-shaped leaves, something like those of blowing off steam. It was faint and dis- a young cocoa-nut palm. You try to brush tant, but deep and strong enough to set one through them, and are caught up instantly guessing its cause. The sea beating into by a string or wire belonging to some other caves seemed at first the simplest answer. plant. You look up and round; and then But the water was so still on this side of you find that the air is full of wires-that the island that one could barely hear the you are hung up in a net-work of fine branchlap of the ripple on the shingle twenty es belonging to half a dozen different sorts yards off, and the nearest surf was several of young trees, and intertwined with as miles away over a mountain a thousand feet many different species of slender creepers. high. Going to bathe in the morning, he You thought at your first glance among the heard again, in perfect calm, the same mys- tree stems that you were looking through terious booming sound, and discovered that open air; you find that you are looking it came from under the water, and was through a labyrinth of wire rigging, and must made by that famous creature known as the use the cutlass right and left at every five drum-fish, which frequents all tropical sea- steps. You push on into a bed of strong, sedgecoasts. like sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you if they are only three and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to it either way, but gradually discover that it is the leaf-stalk of a young cocorite palm. The leaf is five-and-twenty feet long, and springs from a huge ostrich plume, which is sprawling out of the ground and up above your head a few yards off. You cut the leafstalk through right and left, and walk on, to be stopped suddenly (for you get so confused by the multitude of objects that you never see any thing till you run against it) by a gray lichen-covered bar as thick as your ankle. You follow it up with your eye, and find it entwine itself with three or four oth er bars, and roll over with them in great knots and festoons and loops twenty feet high, and then go up with them into the green cloud over your head, and vanish, as if a giant had thrown a ship's cables into the tree-tops. At another of the loops, about as thick as your arm, your companion, if you have a forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few blows of his cutlass he will sever it as high up as he can reach, and again below, some three feet down; and, while you are wondering at this seemingly wanton destruction, he lifts the bar on high, throws his head back, and pours down his thirsty throat a pint or more of pure cold water. This hidden treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending sap, or, rather, the ascending pure rain - water which has been taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft to be elaborated into sap and leaf and flower and fruit and fresh tissue for the very stem up which it originally climbed; and therefore it is that the woodman cuts the water-vine through first at the top of the piece which he wants, and not at the bottom; for so rapid is the ascent of the sap that if he cut the stem below, the water

The primeval forest, or high woods, as it is called in the tropics, is a region with which, even through life-long study, one could never grow familiar. A world of confusion and mystery, it fills the beholder with awe and terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards, and, indeed, without a compass and skillful guide one must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it impossible to give any general sketch of a forest. Once inside "you can not see the wood for the trees." You can only wander on as far as you dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines, all straining upward, in fierce competition, toward the light-food far above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round your head, and rises, thickening and thickening, to an unknown height. The upward lines are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what leaves they bear, being for the most part on the tips of the twigs, give a scattered, mist-like appearance to the under foliage. The straining upward of all growths toward the air and light give one the impression at first that the lower forest is open, and so it is in comparison with the huge mat of flowers,

VOL. XLIII.-No. 258.-54

would have all fled upward before he could some parasite aloft. Up this stem scramcut it off above.

Far above your head, supported by a mat of gigantic branches, is a whole green garden of vegetation, the home of many monkeys, burly red howler and tiny peevish sapajou, living aloft in absolute security. They may peer down at you through cracks in their green mansion, but you can not peer up at them. You look up into the green cloud, and long for a moment to be a monkey. Has he not all the treasures of the tropics at command?-fruits grown ready for his taking, and the parrots, hummingbirds, flowers, and eternal warmth and sunshine for delicious company!

You find nothing.

You look upward at the aerial garden far above you, and wonder whence it has sprung. You scramble round the tree to find, if possible, some token of connection with the soil below. The tree trunk is smooth and free from climbers; and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle, a dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight. And what are their species? what are their families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree when cut refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around.

And what is that delicious scent about the air? Vanilla; and up that stem zigzags the green, fleshy chain of the vanilla orchis. The scented pods hang far above out of your reach.

bles a climbing seguine; up the next another creeper quite different; and so on, through all the infinite variety of tropical vines.

Another fact will soon force itself on your attention. The soil is furrowed every where by holes; by graves, some two or three feet wide and deep, and of uncertain length and shape, often wandering about for thirty or forty feet, and running confusedly into each other. They are not the work of man, nor of an animal; for no earth seems to have been thrown out of them. In the bottom of the dry graves you sometimes see a decaying root; but most of them are full of water, and of tiny fish also. These graves are, some of them, plainly quite new. Some, again, are very old, for trees of all sizes are growing in them and over them.

What makes them? A question not easily answered; but the shrewdest foresters say that they have held the roots of trees now dead. Either the tree has fallen and torn its roots out of the ground, or the roots and stumps have rotted in their place, and the soil above them has fallen in.

But they must decay very quickly, these roots, to leave their quite fresh graves thus empty; and-now one thinks of it-how few fallen trees, or even dead sticks, there are lying about in the high woods!

There are forests in North America through which it is all but impossible to make way, so high are piled up, among the still growing trees, dead logs in every stage of decay. And here, in a forest equally ancient, every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam. Most strange, until you remember that you are in one of nature's hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in a colder climate, would crumble into leaf mould, or perhaps change into peat. This zone of illimitable sun-force destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates again as swiftly as it destroys. Here when the forest giant falls, with the cracking of the roots below, and the lianes aloft rattling like musketry through the woods, till the great trunk comes down upon the forest floor with a boom as of a heavy gun, the genial rain and genial heat act upon the fallen monarch until all the tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves, melt swiftly and peacefully away into the water and carbonic acid and sunlight out of which they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not a wreck behind.

Soon you will be struck by the variety of the vegetation, and will recollect, what you have often heard, that social plants are rare in the tropic forests. Certainly they are rare in Trinidad, where the only instances of social trees are the Moras and the Moriche palms. Northern forests are usually made up of one dominant plant-of firs or of pines, of oaks or of beeches. But here no two plants are alike. Stems rough, smooth, prickly, round, fluted, stilted, upright, sloping, branched, arched, jointed, oppositeleaved, alternate-leaved, leafless, or covered with leaves of every conceivable pattern, are jumbled together till the eye and brain are tired of continually asking "What next?" The stems are of every color-copper, pink, gray, green, brown, black as if burned, marbled with lichens, many of them silvery white, gleaming afar in the bush, Some thirty-six miles south from Port of furred with mosses and delicate creeping Spain lies the famous Pitch Lake, covering film-ferns, or laced with the air-roots of a space of ninety-nine acres, and containing

millions of tons of so-called pitch. It is innumerable particles of the soils through situated in the La Brea district, the whole which it passes. of which is of bituminous character, much of the ground looking like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water overlying the pitch. The whole air is pervaded with a smell of bitumen, and on approaching the lake the evil odors grow oppressive and sickening. The pitch, however, certainly does not injure vegetation, though plants will not grow actually in it. La Brea is famous for many kinds of tropical growths. Pine-apples, for example, are brought here to special perfection. They grow about any where, clinging to the patches of rich brown soil, seemingly unmindful of the pitch spewing and swealing out of the earth in odd wreaths and lumps. Even on the very shores of the lake itself are groups of Moriche fan-palms and thick undergrowths of cocorite.

but

Another object of much interest is the mud volcano lying in one of the central districts of Trinidad. Landing at the port of San Fernando, the hill of which forms a beacon by sea and land for many a mile around, Mr. Kingsley started on horseback up into the thick forest. He had many adventures, floundering in sloughs of mud and clay, sliding down banks, and jumping broad gullies, trusting more to the sagacity of his horse, a little brown cob of the tropics, than to his own horsemanship. But at last he succeeded in reaching the object of his searchthe Salse, or mud volcano. Out of a hut half buried in verdure, on the edge of a little clearing, there tumbled a quaint little old black man, cutlass in hand, who, without being asked, went on ahead as guide. Crookbacked, round-shouldered, his only dress a ragged shirt and tattered pair of drawers, he The surface of this Stygian pool, glaring had evidently thriven upon the forest life for and glittering in the sun, presents a most many a year. He did not walk nor run, singular appearance. The black mass of tumbled along in front, his bare feet plashasphalt is divided by narrow channels of ing from log to log and mud-heap to mudclear water into hundreds of isolated patch-heap, his gray woolly head wagging right es, as if huge foul blotches were dotted all and left, and his cutlass brushing almost inover the surface of a lake of sparkling clear- stinctively at every bough he passed, while Straggling along in the centre are a he turned round every moment to jabber number of small islands, covered with thick something, usually in Creole French. low scrub, near which is the very fountain He led up and down, and at last over a of foulness, the place where the asphalt is flat of rich muddy ground, full of huge trees, still oozing up. The pitch here is yellow and of their roots likewise, where there was and white with sulphur foam; so are the no path at all. The solitude was awful; so water-channels; and out of both water and was the darkness of the shade; so was the pitch innumerable bubbles of gas arise, stifling heat. At length appeared an openloathsome to the smell. On dipping one's ing in the trees, and the little man quickenhands into this liquid pitch one is astonish-ed his pace, and stopped with an air of tried to find that it does not soil the fingers. The old proverb that one can not touch pitch without being defiled happily does not stand true here, or the place would be still more loathsome than now. It may be scraped up and moulded into any shape you will, but nothing is left on the hand save clean gray mud and water. It may be kneaded for an hour before the mud be sufficiently driven out of it to make it sticky. This very abundance of earthy matter it is which, while it keeps the pitch from soiling, makes it far less valuable than it would be if it were pure.

ness.

It is easy to understand whence this earthy matter (twenty or thirty per cent.) comes. Throughout the neighborhood the ground is full, to the depth of hundreds of feet, of coaly and asphaltic substances. Layers of sandstone or of shale containing this decayed vegetable alternate with layers which contain none. And if, as seems probable, the coaly matter is continually changing into asphalt and oil, and then working its way upward through every crack and pore to escape from the enormous pressure of the superincumbent soil, it must needs carry up with it

umph, not unmixed with awe, on the edge of a circular pool of mud and water some two or three acres in extent.

"Dere de debbil's wood-yard," said he, with somewhat bated breath. A more doleful, uncanny, half-made spot could not well be found. The sad forest ringed it round with a green wall, feathered down to the ugly mud, on which, partly perhaps from its saltness, partly from the changeableness of the surface, no plant would grow, save a few herbs and creepers which love the brackish water. Only here and there an echites had crawled out of the wood and lay along the ground, its long shoots gay with large creamcolored flowers and pairs of glossy leaves; and on it and on some dead brush - wood grew a lovely little parasitic orchis, an oncidium, with tiny fans of leaves, and flowers like swarms of yellow butterflies.

There was no track of man, not even a hunter's foot-print, but instead tracks of beasts in plenty. Deer, quenco, and lapo, with smaller animals, had been treading up and down, probably attracted by the saltwater. They were safe enough, the old man said. No hunter dare approach the spot.