22 WANDERINGS IN SOUTH AMERICA. 



cannot : Mature has already run her course, and that 

 healthy-looking branch is only as a fallacious good 

 symptom in him who is just about to die of a mortifi- 

 cation, when he feels no more pain and fancies his dis- 

 temper has left him ; it is as the momentary gleam 

 of a wintry sun's ray close to the western horizon. 

 See ! while we are speaking a gust of wind has 

 brought the tree to the ground, and made room for its 

 successor. 



Come further on, and examine that apparently 

 luxuriant tauronira on thy right hand. It boasts a 

 verdure not its own ; they are false ornaments it wears ; 

 the bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the 

 root to its topmost branch. The succession of fruit 

 which it hath borne, like good cheer in the houses of 

 the great, has invited the birds to resort to it, and they 

 have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants 

 on its branches, which, like the distempers vice brings 

 into the human frame, rob it of all its health and 

 vigour ; they have shortened its days, and probably in 

 another year they will finally kill it, long before nature 

 intended that it should die. 



Ere thou leavest this interesting scene, look on the 

 ground around thee, and see what everything here 

 below must come to. 



Behold that newly-fallen wallaba ! The whirlwind 

 has uprooted it in its prime, and it has brought down 

 to the ground a dozen small ones in its fall. Its bark 

 has already begun to drop off! And that heart of 

 mora close by it is fast yielding, in spite of its firm, 

 tough texture. 



The tree which thou passedst but a little ago, and 

 which perhaps has laid- over yonder brook for years, 



