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We may call it a feudalism; but it resembled European feudalism only as a tree-fern resembles a tree. Let us first briefly consider the nature of the ancient Japanese society.
Evelyn cried out once more as the lumbering thing fled with her, giving utterance to shrieking outcries at which the tree-fern jungle shook. It leaped once, upon monstrous hind legs, but came crashing heavily to the ground. Tommy's explosive bullets had shattered the bones which supported the balancing tail. Now that huge fleshy member dragged uselessly.
A weird marine plant shoves long black stems, crowned with a circle of azure blue eyes, which convey an uncanny sensation of being regarded with sleepless vigilance by mysterious sentinels, transformed and spellbound in ocean depths. Tree-fern and hart's-tongue show verdant fronds, flushed with autumnal red or gold, and a dense growth of starry flowers suggests a bed of many-coloured tulips.
The channel the glacier had chiselled was now full of shining honey-coloured water, hurrying over the granite stones and blocks of quartz and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, while the boulder sat high and dry, with the tall-plumed grasses, and the graceful tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled mimosa crowding about its knees; and remembered old times, long before the little Bushfellow had outlined the koodoo and the buffalo, and the hunter-man with the spear, in black pigments on its smooth flank, ere he ground up the coprolites gathered from the river-bed for red and yellow paint to colour the drawings.
In another lament a grieving mother is compared to the drooping fronds of the tree-fern. The maiden keeping tryst bids the light fleecy cloudlets, which in New Zealand so often scud across the sky before the sea-wind, to be messengers to her laggard gallant. "The sun grows dim and hastes away As a woman from the scene of battle," says the lament for a dead chief.
The sound seemed to come from the rocky rapidly-rising ground beyond the narrow tree-fern shaded gorge where the spring had been found; but though they listened intently for a few moments, there was utter stillness till all at once there was a fresh sound, something between a sigh and a moan, such as an animal might utter if it had been struck down.
From a variety of this tree-fern the natives take a substance called pulu, a fine, soft, brown fuzz, used for stuffing pillows and mattresses. Your guide will probably understand very little English: let him be instructed in your wishes before you set out. The native Hawaiian is the most kind and obliging creature in the world, and you will find your guide ready to do you every needful service.
The types may remain, but the details of their form, their relative proportions, their associates, are all altered. And the tree-fern forest of Tasmania, or New Zealand, gives one only a faint and remote image of the vegetation of the ancient world.
He leaped fallen tree-fern trunks, he splashed through shallow ponds later, when he knew something of the inhabitants of such pools, Tommy would turn cold at that memory and raced on, gasping for breath while the shrieking of the thing that bore Evelyn grew more and more distant. In five minutes he was almost strangling and the thing was half a mile ahead of him.
But the scarcity of these was somewhat compensated by the rich and brilliant colouring of the foliage. The abundance and variety of the ferns also struck the youth particularly. "Ah! zey are magnificent!" exclaimed Verkimier with enthusiasm. "Look at zat tree-fern. You have not'ing like zat in England eh! I have found nearly von hoondred specimens of ferns. Zen, look at zee fruit-trees.
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