88 Naturalist at Large 



down a long lane bordered by the living fence posts so 

 characteristic of Cuba. Fence posts here are placed in the 

 ground to sprout and grow, and so are protected from the 

 ravages of termites. I remember that the bien vestida or 

 well-dressed lady — Gliricidia — was in bloom, and there 

 were gaudy orioles pecking at the blossoms on the pinon 

 posts — rich crimson flowers of an Erythrina. In the spring 

 the hedgerows built of the Gliricidia are masses of pale 

 mauve flowers, not unlike wistaria. These make the road- 

 sides gay with color, for an enormous number of the trop- 

 ical trees planted for roadside shade or for ornament are 

 of somber dark green, a green far darker than we are ac- 

 customed to see here in the North. 



We walked on until we reached the woods. In Cuba, 

 you do not find a beech grove or a maple swamp or a 

 clump of pines, as elsewhere in the tropics. There may be 

 trees of a hundred different species in an acre, and as Spanish 

 has absorbed much Arabic, so Antillean Spanish has ab- 

 sorbed far more Indian terminology than our English has 

 done here. I often love to mouth over the sonorous Indian 

 names of the trees we found about us. Are they not very 

 lovely — ocuje, caoba, jucaro, yayajabita, acona, yaya, and 

 innumerable others? I do not think we had been more than 

 half an hour from the house when I found a rather damp 

 spot in the woods w^here there were a lot of loose flat 

 stones. I began turning these over and before long was 

 entranced to find a number of tiny frogs, rich maroon 

 in color with golden-yellow stripes which ran from the 

 tip of the snout down each siJe of the body. These were 

 indescribably lovely little frogs, scarce a quarter of an 

 inch long from stem to stern, and I knew at once that we 



