self up some acclivity by pulling, hand over hand, on a creeper
trailing from a tree.

Certain that he could find his way back, he did not blaze the way. Here
and there he hewed down a thorny limb which tore at his clothes, or cut
a creeper from a tree, but he made no effort to mark his path.

Occasionally he came to a little glade, a space clear of trees but
hemmed in by the eternal jungle just the same. Here the way was choked
with rank cogon grass, growing from eight to twelve feet high. He found
this as mean a growth to pass through as any briar patch or cane-brake.

Cogon grass seems a useless parasite on the bosom of old Mother Earth,
and yet it presents a compensation in its gorgeous white bloom, for,
like the poppy, the cogon is a show-piece of nature, and she flaunts it
in places where beauty is needed, too. Jimmie had never seen a field of
buckwheat in blossom, or he might have compared the cogon stretches to
fields in the United States at certain seasons of the year.

Even in his haste, in the uncomfortable day, the boy stopped to gaze in
wonder at the wonderful balete tree, which is a representative of the
fig family. This tree begins life as a parasite, at least it springs to
life in a crotch of some other tree. Here it thrives on the humus and
decayed vegetable matter and sends long, winding tendrils down to the
ground.

These tendrils take root and grow with such vigor that the supporting
trunk is rapidly enveloped in a coalescing mass of stems, while its own
branches are overtopped by the usurper, which kills it eventually as
much by stealing its sunshine as by appropriating the soil at its base.
When very old these trees possess a massive trunk, usually, with a large
cavity in the middle where the trunk of the other tree rotted out. Some
of the younger trees, however, seem to stand on stilts.

Jimmie saw many things to marvel at, for a Philippine forest is not at
all like a forest in the states of New York or Illinois. In the glades
he saw plants of enormous size, with leaves seven feet long. He came
upon rattan or bejuco thickets, where thorns, pointing down the stems
like barbs on a fish-hook, snatched at his clothes and clung to them
too.

A variety of this plant has a stem, trailing on the ground, five hundred
feet long. This stem is hollow and divided into compartments by
diaphragms at the joints, like the bamboo. Each compartment contains
about a mouthful of pure water.

Jimmie climbed up