It has climbed up the shrubs some fifteen feet, and is now tumbling down again in masses of the purest deep green, which are always softly rounded, because each slender leaf is sabre-shaped, and always curves inward and downward into the mass, presenting to the paper thousands of minute saw-edges, hard enough and sharp enough to cut clothes, skin, and flesh to ribands, if it is brushed in the direction of the leaves.

For shape and colour, few plants would look more lovely in a hothouse; but it would soon need to be confined in a den by itself, like a jaguar or an alligator.
Here, too, we saw a beautiful object, which was seen again more than once about the high woods; a large flower, {162b} spreading its five flat orange-scarlet lobes round yellow bells.

It grows in little bunches, in the axils of pairs of fleshy leaves, on a climbing vine.

When plucked, a milky sap exudes from it.

It is a cousin of our periwinkles, and cousin, too, of the Thevetia, which we saw at St. Thomas's, and of the yellow Allamandas which ornament hothouses at home, as this, and others of its family, especially the yellow Odontadenia, surely ought to do.