Page:Siam and Laos, as seen by our American missionaries (1884).pdf/84

 ting together a whole grove; avenues of intersecting branches, like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral, covered with yellow flowers of a most delicious fragrance; the white and purple of the pemea, combining the beauties of the rhododendron and horse-chestnut; the blue-blossoming Thunbergia; the Burmese Amherstia, like a giant fuchsia on the scale of an oak. Then there is the graceful palm tribe—the palmyra; the date; the lofty areca with its sweet-scented buds and great clusters of nuts; the tufted-crowned, sea-loving cocoanut, whose fruit supplies food, drink and oil, its fibrous casing ropes, vessels and mats, and its plaited leaves dishes and the thatch of the native's cottage, the large stalks fences, and whose slender bole is adapted for innumerable uses from a post to a canoe. Underneath all this Oriental shade a lovely confusion of fungi, mosses, and every variety of ferns, from delicate maiden-hair to the tall fronds fifteen and twenty feet high.

Birds of brilliant plumage and beautiful form inhabit these Oriental forests—long-legged swamp-fowls, tall as a man and swift as a greyhound; paroquets with green bodies and scarlet beaks fly screaming from tree to tree; the snowy pelican, the white ibis, the argus, the blue-jay, the black and white robin; birds of paradise and humming-birds. The sea-swallow builds her nest in the hollows and caves