For the cannon ball, in coming down, avenged itself by dropping exactly on the bridge of his nose, felling him to the ground, and giving him such a pair of black eyes that he was not seen on parade for a fortnight.
The pulp of this cannon-ball is, they say, 'vinous and pleasant' when fresh; but those who are mindful of what befell our forefather Adam from eating strange fruits, will avoid it, as they will many more fruits eaten in the Tropics, but digestible only by the dura ilia of Indians and Negroes.

Whatever virtue it may have when fresh, it begins, as soon as stale, to give out an odour too abominable to be even recollected with comfort.
More useful, and the fruit of an even grander tree, are those 'Brazil nuts' which are sold in every sweet-shop at home.

They belong to Bertholletia excelsa, a tree which grows sparingly--I have never seen it wild--in the southern part of the island, but plentifully in the forests of Guiana, and which is said to be one of the tallest of all the forest giants.

The fruit, round like the cannon-ball, and about the size of a twenty-four pounder, is harder than the hardest wood, and has to be battered to pieces with the back of a hatchet to disclose the nuts, which lie packed close inside.

Any one who has hammered at a Bertholletia fruit will be ready to believe the story that the Indians, fond as they are of the nuts, avoid the 'totocke' trees till the fruit has all fallen, for fear of fractured skulls; and the older story which Humboldt gives out of old Laet, {228} that the Indians dared not enter the forests, when the trees were fruiting, without having their heads and shoulders covered with bucklers of hard wood.