WRIT IN WATER 



Brobdingnagian, in which she offers them to 

 man. Such a suggestion bubbles up from 

 some of the hot springs in Abyssinia, which 

 issue from the top of what look like huge 

 ant-hills, twenty feet high, but in reality are 

 pyramids built by successive mineral de- 

 posits of the water itself. Still stranger are 

 the beakers she fashions in the shape of 

 water-storing plants for arid regions like the 

 deserts of Mexico. Such plants, "with pri- 

 vate cisterns," are the Ibervillea sonora, the 

 Beaucarnea cedipus, which has the basis of 

 its trunk swollen to a diameter of seven or 

 eight feet, the barrel cactus, and the Pilo- 

 cereus fulviceps, of which a single plant may 

 retain several hundred gallons of water. 

 From these larger goblets nature tapers 

 down till she plays doll's house with the 

 naughty enticements of pitcher-plants, 

 which she designs in thirty-five species in the 

 tropics alone. 



Reading of these parched lands, where 

 the sound of flowing or falling water is never 

 heard, one feels a fresh compassion for the 



thirsty Israelites, who, on their painful jour- 

 is 



