80 TROPIC DAYS 



word signifies and embodies. Many a one was laid to 

 rest beneath its spreading branches, for it was the 

 custom of the pre-white folk's days to swathe the dead 

 in frail strips of bark, knees to chin, and place the 

 stiffened corpse in a shallow pit in the humpy which 

 had been in most recent occupation. If the dead during 

 life had possessed exceptional qualities, burial rites 

 would be ceremonious and prolonged. With tear and 

 blood stained faces (for the mourners enforced grief by 

 laceration of the flesh) incidents in the admirable career 

 of the departed would be rehearsed in pantomime. The 

 enactment of scenes from the life of the hunter and 

 fighter might occupy hours. The art of the canoe or 

 sword maker would be graphically mimicked. The life 

 of the woman found rehearsal from infancy until she 

 passed from the protection of her father into the arms 

 of her lover. If she had died childless, a protesting 

 infant or an efHgy in bark would be placed on her 

 shrunken bosom, so that she might not suffer the re- 

 proach of matrons who had preceded her to the mysteri- 

 ous better country. 



The ancestral shade was a birthplace, an abiding- 

 place, a cemetery, and the soil grew ever richer, and the 

 thick-trunked tree displayed its ruddy flowers and gave 

 of its best in nectar for birds and butterflies and gauze- 

 winged, ever-flitting creatures. 



It was not a comfortable tree to climb, for its grey- 

 green branches were studded with wens each armed with 

 a keen prickle, long and tough. It offered the hospitality 

 of its shade to man, but little else, save flowers to gladden 

 his eyes, though it stood as a perpetual calendar, or rather 

 floral harbinger, of some of the most excellent things in 

 life. At a certain season its big, trilobed, hollow-stalked 

 leaves changed from bright green to pale yellow and 

 lingeringly fell, and often before the last disappeared, 



