tates. My first visit to Florida was made particularly enjoyable by
reason of the palms and bananas there to be seen, and I have by no means
lost the feeling of admiration for the latter especially. In Yucatan
there were to be seen other and stranger growths and fruits, and the
novelty of a great cocoanut grove is yet a memory not eclipsed by the
present-day Floridian and Bahamian productions of the same sort.

It was, therefore, with some astonishment that I came to know, a few
years ago, more of a little tree bearing a fruit that had been familiar
from my boyhood, but which I was then informed was the sole northern
representative of a great family of tropical fruits, and which was
fairly called the American banana. The papaw it was; a fruit all too
luscious and sweet, when fully ripe in the fall, for most tastes, but
appealing strongly to the omnivorous small boy. I suppose most of my
readers know its banana-like fruits, four or five inches long, green
outside, but filled with soft and sweet aromatic yellow pulp, punctuated
by several fat bean-like seeds.

[Illustration: The papaw in bloom]

But it is the very handsome and distinct little tree, with its decidedly
odd flowers, I would celebrate, rather than the fruits. This tree,
rather common to shady places in eastern America as far north as New
York, is worth much attention, and worth planting for its spreading
richness of foliage. The leaves are large, and seem to carry into the
cold North a hint of warmth and of luxuriant growth not common, by any
means--I know of only one other hardy tree, the cucumber magnolia, with
an approaching character. The arrangement of these handsome papaw leaves
on the branches, too, makes the complete mass of regularly shaped
greenery that is the special characteristic of this escape from the
tropics; and, since I have seen the real papaw of the West Indies in
full glory, I am more than ever glad for the handsomer tree that belongs
to the regions of cold and vigor.

[Illustration: Flowers of the papaw]

The form of our papaw, or _Asimina triloba_--the botanical name is
rather pleasing--is noticeable, and as characteristic as its leafage.
See these side branches, leaving the slender central stem with a
graceful up-curve, but almost at once swinging down, only to again curve
upward at the ends! Are they not graceful? Such branches as these point
nature's marvelous engineering, to appreciate which one needs only to
try to imagine a s