, the proper house of Obeah. To cut down one
is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A
Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the
men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to
defy the devil.

From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens.
I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond
description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English
conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of
others of which we cannot raise even Liliputian imitations. Let man be
what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing
in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage
towering up into the sky to the fan-palm of the desert whose fronds are
reservoirs of water.

Of exogenous trees the majority were leguminous in some shape or other,
forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seeds in pods;
yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments
of an English park. They had Old-World names with characters wholly
different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no
relations of peaches, and gum-trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can
be unlike another.

Again, you saw ferns which you seemed to recognize till some unexpected
anomaly startled you out of your mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or
what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem
like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was
the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia nobilis_, at a distance like a
splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendent bunches, each
separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a
large orchid, with which it had not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia
being leguminous like the rest.

Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice-trees,
orange-trees, coffee plants, and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special
virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits
of fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was
preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener
stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less
frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odor, in which I might
have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a
manchinee