Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/176

Rh yellow colour, and of the most delicate and graceful form. The manner in which the capsule opens, and throws out the bunches of cotton in which the seeds are embedded, is wonderfully pretty. I must now paint this, as well as the Southern Cross above the palm-trees.

The palm-trees! I never grow weary of contemplating the waving of their heads in the wind, and the soft and majestic inclination of the branches. They are full of poetry and of symbolic beauty; they speak forcibly of the union of the noble in thought and deed, and the beautiful in expression: wherever I turn they meet my eye with new aspects of beauty. The palm-tree's crown has generally from fourteen to sixteen branches. Every month, or every alternate month, one of the lower branches falls off. I have often seen such, six or seven ells long, lying across the path as I have been driving out, and every month a new one shoots forth. This always shoots up in the centre of the crown, like an upright sceptre ruling the tree; it unfolds itself first at the point, and the delicate leaves sport in the wind like a green flame, or flag, above the tree.

It is customary in this neighbourhood to cut off the branches of the palm in the woods and fields for the purposes of thatching roofs, &c., and the tree is sometimes left with merely two or three branches, by which one might imagine that it was bereft of all its beauty; but no! the despoiled palm elevates its two remaining branches with a graceful bend towards the branches of another tree in the same condition, and you behold gothic porticoes, and arches of the most beautiful proportions, arising in the fields, or in the depths of the forest: to deprive the palm of its nobility and its beauty, requires the destruction of its life. The king-palm has always an upright column or stem; the cocoa-palm, on the contrary, has a curved, leaning stem, much thinner than that of the king-palm. I see the latter almost always heavily laden with fruit, which grows