When they intend to cut one down, they first pour rum at the root as a propitiatory offering.' The Jamaica Negro, however, fells them for canoes, the wood being soft, and easily hollowed.

But here, as in Demerara, the trees are left standing about in cane-pieces and pastures to decay into awful and fantastic shapes, with prickly spurs and board-walls of roots, high enough to make a house among them simply by roofing them in; and a flat crown of boughs, some seventy or eighty feet above the ground, each bough as big as an average English tree, from which dangles a whole world, of lianes, matapalos, orchids, wild pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least, that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus--a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough, it has been discovered in Angola--the only species of the Cactus tribe in the Old World.
And now we set ourselves to walk up to the Depot, where the Government timber was being felled, and the real 'High Woods' to be seen at last.

Our path lay, along the half-finished tramway, through the first Cacao plantation I had ever seen, though, I am happy to say, not the last by many a one.
Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large long leaves.

Each tree is trained to a single stem.

Among them, especially near the path, grow plants of the common hothouse Datura, its long white flowers perfuming all the air.