It will touch the earth, take root below, send out side-fibres above, call down younger roots to help it, till the whole bole, clasped and stifled in their embraces, dies and rots out, and the Matapalo (or Scotch attorney, {85a} as it is rudely called here) stands alone on stilted roots, and board walls of young wood, slowly coalescing into one great trunk; master of the soil once owned by the patron on whose vitals he has fed: a treacherous tyrant; and yet, like many another treacherous tyrant, beautiful to see, with his shining evergreen foliage, and grand labyrinth of smooth roots, standing high in air, or dangling from the boughs in search of soil below; and last, but not least, his Magnolia-like flowers, rosy or snowy-white, and green egg-shaped fruits.
Now turn homewards, past the Rosa del monte {85b} bush (bushes, you must recollect, are twenty feet high here), covered with crimson roses, full of long silky crimson stamens: and then try--as we do daily in vain--to recollect and arrange one-tenth of the things which you have seen.
One look round at the smaller wild animals and flowers.

Butterflies swarm round us, of every hue.

Beetles, you may remark, are few; they do not run in swarms about these arid paths as they do at home.

But the wasps and bees, black and brown, are innumerable.

That huge bee in steel-blue armour, booming straight at you--whom some one compared to the Lord Mayor's man in armour turned into a cherub, and broken loose--( get out of his way, for he is absorbed in business)-- is probably a wood-borer, {85c} of whose work you may read in Mr. Wood's Homes without Hands.