120 THE NORTHERN MOUNTAINS. 



wonderful leaves and stems, flowers and fruits, and introduce 

 them into ornamentation, architectural or other. 



And so I end my little episode about these Lecythids, only 

 adding that the reader must not confound with their nuts the 

 butter-nuts, Qaryocar, or Souari, which may be bought, I 

 believe, at Fortnum and Mason's, and which are of all nuts 

 the largest and the most delicious. They have not been 

 found as yet in Trinidad, though they abound in Guiana. 

 They are the fruit also of an enormous tree ^ there is a young 

 one fruiting finely in the Botanic Garden at Port of Spain 

 of a quite different order ; a cousin of the Matapalos and of 

 the Soap-berries. It carries large threefold leaves on pointed 

 stalks; spikes of flowers with innumerable stamens; and here 

 and there a fruit something like the Cannon-ball, though not 

 quite as large. On breaking the soft rind you find it full of 

 white meal, probably eatable, and in the meal three or four 

 great hard wrinkled nuts, rounded on one side, wedge-shaped 

 on the other, which, cracked, are found full of almond-like 

 white jelly, so delicious that one can well believe travellers 

 when they tell us that the Indian tribes wage war against 

 each other for the possession of the trees which bear these 

 precious vagaries of bounteous Xature. 



And now we began to near the village, two scattered rows 

 of clay and timber bowers right and left of the trace, each 



1 Carj'ocar butyrosnm. 



