it may, there they
were, ladies from the ancient and incomprehensible Mowery Land, like
fossil bones of an old world sticking out amid the vegetation of the
new; and we will charitably hope that they were the better for being
there.

After church we wandered about the estate to see huge trees. One
Ceiba, left standing in a cane-piece, was very grand, from the
multitude and mass of its parasites and its huge tresses of lianes;
and grand also from its form. The prickly board-wall spurs were at
least fifteen feet high, some of them, where they entered the trunk;
and at the summit of the trunk, which could not have been less than
seventy or eighty feet, one enormous limb (itself a tree) stuck out
quite horizontally, and gave a marvellous notion of strength. It
seemed as if its length must have snapped it off, years since, where
it joined the trunk; or as if the leverage of its weight must have
toppled the whole tree over. But the great vegetable had known its
own business best, and had built itself up right cannily; and stood,
and will stand for many a year, perhaps for many a century, if the
Matapalos do not squeeze out its life. I found, by the by, in
groping my way to that tree through canes twelve feet high, that one
must be careful, at least with some varieties of cane, not to get
cut. The leaf-edges are finely serrated; and more, the sheaths of
the leaves are covered with prickly hairs, which give the Coolies
sore shins if they work bare-legged. The soil here, as everywhere,
was exceedingly rich, and sawn out into rolling mounds and steep
gullies--sometimes almost too steep for cane-cultivation--by the
tropic rains. If, as cannot be doubted, denudation by rain has gone
on here, for thousands of years, at the same pace at which it goes
on now, the amount of soil removed must be very great; so great,
that the Naparimas may have been, when they were first uplifted out
of the Gulf, hundreds of feet higher than they are now.

Another tree we went to see in the home park, of which I would have
gladly obtained a photograph. A Poix doux, {187a} some said it was;
others that it was a Figuier. {187b} I incline to the former
belief, as the leaves seemed to me pinnated: but the doubt was
pardonable enough. There was not a leaf on the tree which was not
nigh one hundred feet over our heads. For size of spurs and wealth
of parasites the tree was almost as remarkable as the Ceiba I