When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the single man of the tropics to take unto himself a helpmeet for him, and to provide for other events likely to come after, he selects some fertile spot, usually on the border of waters over which his canoe may easily carry the bulky harvests he will have; and there he cuts down tree and vine, bush and bamboo, and lets them lie as they fall in tangled mass. Every day the ardent sun helps the constant wind to shrivel leaf and twig until, one day, the windward edge of that snarl is touched by the torch, and in a moment a blazing hades is where a cool and shady grove will soon rustle in the breeze. When the last flame has flickered out and coals lie dead beneath their gray shroud, women paddle to that place with canoes laden with banana sprouts. With machetes they dig little pits amid charred stumps and trunks and branches, and in each hole they set a sprout. Then they go away to wait, and rest; and the sun shines warmly down into that clearing, breezes sift a gray veil of ashes over the wilted suckers that look like black and ragged stakes; and at last come showers which wash them clean. Those stakes are made up of sheathes of leaves tightly rolled one around another, the inner ones narrow, cream-colored and tender; those nearer the outer ones wider and yet wider, until the outer one is reached. The outer one covers nearly or quite three-fourths of the stem. When the warm rains fall, the tender leaves unroll and spread to their widest, and the sun dries and the wind whips them until soon they are split into narrow ribbons; and a few weeks after that planting a sea of giant leaves waves and whispers in the breeze--a roof of bright and tender green covering the moist, black ground. Not before the plant has grown to a height of ten to twenty, and in some places to thirty feet, does the flower-stem begin pushing its way up from the base through the middle of the stalk. In a short time it sends out at the top one or more leaves, smaller than their older fellows, as a signal that flower and fruit will quickly follow. Soon every supporting column of those graceful arches ends in a cone of red that deepens into purple and swells until its outer petals are crowded off by the fatness of the fruit they hide, that these may have air and light. Under those petals the baby bananas are packed close, like fingers tightly gripping the parent stem. These closed ranks, each separate hand or whorl reaching half way around the stalk, grow so quickly that in six or eight weeks the bunch weighs fifty pounds or more.