VERY WONDERFUL TREES aE 
beautiful as the real stars of the real sky. ‘Then 
there are other trees that have their roots grow- 
ing right out of the ground, and going up more 
than a hundred feet high into the air. At the top 
of them is the tree itself, going up another hundred 
feet, or perhaps more, so that the real tree—the 
trunk at any rate—begins in the air, and before you 
could climb it, you would have to climb its roots, 
which does seem funny. And there are palm-trees 
with long, tall, slender trunks, smooth and shining, 
crowned with leaves that are like large green fans ; 
and rattan-palms, which are quite different, for 
instead of being straight, their trunks twist round 
and round the trunks of other trees, going right up 
to their very tops, and raising their own most beauti- 
ful feathery ones above theirs. Sometimes they will 
climb first up one tree and then down it again, and 
up another, and then down that, till they have climbed 
up and down several trees, all of them very, very 
tall. How tall—or rather how /onug—shey must be 
you may think. We say that a snake is so many 
feet long, not tall, and these rattan-palms are palm- 
creepers, great vegetable serpents, that twist and coil 
as they grow, and hug the forest in their great coils, 
which are larger and more powerful than those of 
any python or boa-constrictor. A python or a boa- 
constrictor could not kill a very large animal, but the 
