UG THE NORTHERN MOUNTAINS. 



liigli over the green gulf. Xow all stopped together; for the 

 ground was sprinkled tliiek with great beads, scarlet, with a 

 black eye, which had fallen from some tree high overhead ; 

 and we all set to work like schoolboys, filling our pockets with 

 them for the ladies at home. Xow the path was lost, having 

 vanished in the six months' growth of weeds ; and we liad 

 to beat about for it over fallen lo^s, throucih tangles of liane 

 and thickets of the tall Arouma,^ a cane with a flat tuft of 

 leaves atop, which is plentiful in these dark, damp, northern 

 slopes. Xow we struggled and hopped, horse and man, down 

 and round a corner, at the head of a glen, where a few flag- 

 stones fallen across a gully gave an uncertain foothold, and 

 paused, under damp rocks covered with white and pink 

 Begonias and ferns of innumerable forms, to drink the clear 

 mountain water out of cups extemporised from a Calathea 

 leaf; and then struggled up again over roots and ledges, and 

 round the next spur, in cool green darkness, on which it 

 seemed the sun had never shone ; and in a silence which, 

 when our own voices ceased, was saddening, all but appalling. 

 At last, striking into a broader trace which came from the 

 westward, we found ourselves some six or eight hundred feet 

 above the sea, in scenery still like a magnified Clovelly, 

 but amid a vegetation which how can I describe ? Suffice it 

 to say, that right and left of the path, and arching together 



^ Ischuosiphon. 



