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Not until we reach the extreme confines of life, in the Arctic regions or on the borders of an utter desert, will competition cease. The land may be extremely cold or dry, yet there will be competition between some few species, or between the individuals of the same species, for the warmest or dampest spots.

Well might our travel-tost doctor exclaim, "When I stand on the rampart and look around I can scarce help thinking myself enchanted." It was truly a garden of Armida for a native of one of the dampest corners of North Britain.

Here, in one of the dampest and most dreary cells, immured with lizards, tarantulas, and other vile and unwholesome reptiles, Captain Bezan, but so very recently-risen from a sick bed, and yet smarting under his wounds, found himself.

The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption of the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to picnic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar's wife. She was all sighs and flightiness.

Its dense, dark jungle is broken up mainly by pepper and gambier plantations, the latter specially in new clearings. The laborers on these are Chinese, and so are the wood-cutters and sawyers, who frequent the round-topped wooded undulations. The climate is hotter and damper, to one's sensations at least, than the hottest and dampest of the tropical houses at Kew, and heat-loving insects riot.

Or perhaps there is a moment of stillness; the match flares up bravely; the nearest twigs catch fire, crackling and sparkling; you hurriedly lay on more sticks; but the fire deliberately dodges them, creeps to the corner of the pile where the twigs are fewest and dampest, snaps feebly a few times, and expires in smoke. Now where are you? How far is it to the nearest match?

"Yes, we enjoyed the exhibition, but I am not sure but I should have enjoyed New Orleans more without the exhibition. That took so much time. There is nothing so wearisome as an exhibition. But New Orleans was charming. I don't know why, for it's the flattest, dirtiest, dampest city in the world; but it is charming.

On the other hand, if I omitted the water until the earth became dry, she would choose the dampest spot that remained in which to form her nest, and seemed to welcome the water-drops, drinking herself from them, and feeling the damp earth with her antennæ.

Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the dampest, the door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the middle of such a quantity of fuel that he looks like Birnam Wood taking a winter walk. He kindles this heap in a twinkling, and produces a jorum of hot brandy and water; for that bottle of his keeps company with the seasons, and now holds nothing but the purest eau de vie.

In many parts the Eucalypti grew to a great size and composed a noble forest. In some of the dampest ravines tree-ferns flourished in an extraordinary manner; I saw one which must have been at least twenty feet high to the base of the fronds, and was in girth exactly six feet. The fronds, forming the most elegant parasols, produced a gloomy shade, like that of the first hour of night.