112 DAYS OUT OF DOORS. 



trees at home it is thought necessary to dig a small-sized 

 cellar, fill it with selected fertilizers, and tend the tree 

 subsequently as though it were an invalid. 



Such trees, however, do not have a long lease of life, 

 even if the barren rock and the atmosphere combine to 

 furnish them sufficient food. They are sure sooner or 

 later to be in the track of a tornado, or are too heavily 

 weighted with snow, and so are toppled over. I examined 

 the roots of one such tree that had been overturned but 

 the winter before, and could find no evidence of any root 

 having penetrated a foot in depth. They had merely 

 clasped the rock as the ivy does a stone wall, or the poison- 

 vine the shaggy bark of an oak or elm. This prostrate 

 tree was not dead, although the roots were exposed to the 

 air fully as much as the branches. There was sap in the 

 one and bright green buds all over the other. What 

 growth it would make I then wondered, and now long to 

 know if, this 20th of May, just a year later, the tree still 

 lives. 



Of invertebrate life, spiders were most numerous upon 

 the rocks, yet I could find no webs. One noble fellow, 

 richly brown and black and quite an inch long, was 

 the fit companion for the savage skinks that tenant the 

 precipitous rocks ; of which reptiles, more hereafter. The 

 spider whose friendship I endeavored to cultivate proved 

 quite as much at home in the water as upon the rock, and 

 after finding my persistent chasing was tiresome, or likely 

 to prove dangerous, ran down the side of the rock to a 

 slightly projecting ledge, a foot beneath the surface. He 

 glistened like silver as he went, the hair upon his body and 

 legs holding little beads of air, which serve the double 

 purpose of supplying breath and of buoying him. I tried 

 in many ways to dislodge him, and when, with a switch, 

 I pushed him into the deep water, he came to the surface 

 like a cork, and ran like a " skater " to shore. A second 



