178 THE MEMOEABLE. 



sun's rays struggle through the many-stained glass of a 

 painted window. Choice plants that I had been used to 

 see fostered and tended in pots in our stove-houses at home, 

 were there in wild and 7'iant luxuriance. The very carpet 

 was a dense Lycopodium, of most delicate tracery, cast 

 thick over the prostrate tree-trunks, and the rugged 

 masses of rock ; and elegant ferns were arching out of 

 the crevices. Enormous towering figs and Santa-Marias 

 were seen here and there, venerable giants of a thousand 

 years at least, whose vast trunks pierced through the 

 general roof of quivering foliage, and expanded far above, 

 while from the crevices of their rough bark, and from the 

 forks of the lesser trees curious and elegant parasites, 

 — wild pines, ferns, orchids, cactuses, pothoses, — were 

 clustering in noble profusion of vegetable life. These 

 trees, too, were connected and laced together by long 

 leaves, just as the masts of a ship are laced with the 

 various stays, braces, and halyards ; some of them stout 

 and cable-like, others mere slender cords, passing to and 

 fro, hanging in loops, or loosely waving in the air. 



Yet amidst all this magniticence of vegetation, there 

 was nothing that took so strong a hold on my imagina- 

 tion as the arborescent ferns. To see these plants, whose 

 elegant grace I had so often admired in our English 

 lanes, so magnified that the crown of out-curving fronds 

 shaded an area of twenty feet in diameter, and yet pre- 

 serving all the voluptuous lightness and minute sub- 

 division which are so characteristic of these plants, and 

 this feathery diadem of leaves reared on the summit of a 



