24 
WANDERINGS IN 
FIRST 
JOURNEY 
them. One branch of it still looks healthy ! Will 
it recover ? No, it cannot; nature 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 mortification when he feels no more 
pain, and fancies his distemper 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 every thing 
here below must come to. 
Behold that newly fallen wallaba! The whirl¬ 
wind 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. 
