A DAY IN THE DEEP WOODS. 131 



broad leaves. This once strapped to his shoulders, he 

 took up the calabash, the cutlass and blazing brands, 

 and bade me follow him. I did so, carrying, of course, 

 my gun (my never-absent friend), and swinging on 

 my game-basket, with a supply of cartridges. 



He then led the way down the hill, and stopped 

 almost in sight of the smoke of our fire in camp. It 

 was beneath a tree of vast size, which shot up from a 

 wilderness of fallen trunks and limbs, a gommier, 

 towering aloft in kingly majesty, enveloped in lianes 

 which hung from every bough and limb, thickly 

 covered with broad-leaved parasites, orchids and wild 

 pines, its base throwing out strong buttresses like 

 the cypress of the South, but higher and broader, its 

 upper limbs jagged and weather-beaten, stretching 

 their multitudinous fingers heavenward two hundred 

 feet above us. It was beginning to decay, and this 

 forest monarch of centuries, perhaps, was almost 

 ready to totter on his throne. 



Meyong pointed to a dark spot as large as my hand, 

 some sixty feet above, and said, "You no see um?" 



"See what?" 



"Zebees!" 



Then I fully understood the meaning of his prep- 

 arations, which I had till then hardly surmised. This 

 was a bee-free, the home of a swarm, one of the 

 numberless progeny of some bees from Europe, which 

 went wild a hundred years ago. 



Laying his gun at the foot of the tree, and lopping 

 off a few leaves from a parasite overhead, to protect 

 it from the damp, Meyong seized hold of a large liane, 

 cut it from its attachment at the base, and climbed up 

 into the tree. Remember, there were no limbs for 



