/O Summer Studies of Birds and Books CHAP. 



which a traveller's descriptive power can reach. Let 

 me quote a few words : 



" For the first moment the forest seems more open 

 than an English wood. But try to walk through it, 

 and ten steps undeceive you. You look up and 

 around; and then you find that the air is full of 

 wires, that you are hung up in a network of fine 

 branches belonging to half-a-dozen different sorts of 

 young trees, and intertwined with as many different 

 species of slender creepers. You thought at your 

 first glance among the tree-stems that you were 

 looking through open air ; you find that you are 

 looking through a labyrinth of wire rigging, and 

 must use the cutlass right and left at every five 

 steps." 



And so on for whole pages of masterly description, 

 dictated by an almost childlike astonishment at find- 

 ing the expectations of a lifetime so entirely outdone 

 .by the reality. 



Few of us can look forward to the enjoyment of 

 these uncomfortable delights, except in reading and 

 re-reading the old familiar books. Yet I think that 

 these last two summers I have tasted them for a few 

 short hours ; a very faint flavour of them it was a 

 bare suspicion of distant resemblance ; and this was 

 in England, and within half a mile of my own 

 home in this county. If you would gain some dim 

 notion of what tropical vegetation is, try a neglected 



