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A strange variation from the normal type of the family; yet not so strange, after all, as that of another variety in the high mountain woods, which, finding neither ponds to float in nor swamp to root in, has taken to lodging as a parasite among the wet moss on tree-trunks; not so strange, either, as that of yet another, which floats, but in the most unexpected spots, namely, in the water which lodges between the leaf-sheaths of the wild pines, perched on the tree-boughs, a parasite on parasites; and sends out long runners, as it grows, along the bough, in search of the next wild pine and its tiny reservoirs.
Then, in a moment, as some leading strand gives way, the whole mass falls smothered, bruised, and crushed to be left for a month and more before the fires destroy the faded relics of the erstwhile gloriously rampant jungle. In all this the lawyer cane is the most aggressive and hostile. Not only are there prickles on the 10-feet thongs, but the leaves and leaf-sheaths are thickly beset.
With remarkable rapidity one of the species shoots up a ruddy symmetrical, slightly tapering stem smooth and polished where the old leaf-sheaths have been shed to a height of 20 and 30 feet, producing leaves 15 feet long and 2 feet broad, small and crude flowers, and bunches of dwarf fruit containing little but shot-like seeds.
Forbes, the naturalist, in his account of his "Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago," tells how he passed down through "plots of amaryllideæ, iris, and other water-loving plants" in this quarter of the garden; and how he found the "glory" of "the richest palmetum in the world the Cyrtostachys renda, whose long bright scarlet leaf-sheaths and flower-spathes, and its red fruit and deep yellow inflorescence hanging side by side, at once arrest the eye."
But about noontide I entered a wood close by the stream, a beech-wood, intending to rest myself; the herbage was thin and scattered there, sprouting up from amid the leaf-sheaths and nuts of the beeches, which had fallen year after year on that same spot; the outside boughs swept low down, the air itself seemed green when you entered within the shadow of the branches, they over-roofed the place so with tender green, only here and there showing spots of blue.
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