A DAY IN THE DEEP WOODS. I31 
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?” 
“Ze bees 1” 
Then I fully understood the meaning of his prep- 
arations, which I had till then hardly surmised. This 
was a bee-tree, 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 
