It would take you weeks to go in a steamer to where the Birds of Paradise live, and if you were to go, not in a steamer but in a ship with sails, it would take you longer still. But when you got there you would not see the Birds of Paradise flying all about, as soon as you went ashore out of the ship or the steamer, as you would see sparrows here. Oh no, Birds of Paradise are not so common as that, even in their own country. They do not come into the towns, like sparrows, either, but live in the great forests where people do not often go, and even when one does go into them, it is difficult to see them amongst the great tall trees and the broad-fronded ferns and the long, hanging creepers that make a tangle from one tree to another. Ah, those are wonderful forests, those forests far away over the seas! Some of the trees have trunks so thick that a dozen men--or perhaps twenty--would not be able to circle them round by joining their hands together, and so tall that when you looked up you would not be able to see their tops. They would go shooting up and up like the spires of great cathedrals, till at last they would be lost in a green sky, not the real sky, the blue one--that would be higher up still--but a green sky of leaves made by all the trees themselves, and in this sky of leaves there would be flower-stars almost as bright and as beautiful as the real stars of the real sky. Then there are other trees that have their roots growing right out of the ground, and going up more than a hundred feet high into the air. At the top of them is the tree itself, going up another hundred feet, or perhaps more, so that the real tree--the trunk at any rate--begins in the air, and before you could climb it, you would have to climb its roots, which _does_ seem funny. And there are palm-trees with long, tall, slender trunks, smooth and shining, crowned with leaves that are like large green fans; and rattan-palms, which are quite different, for instead of being straight, their trunks twist round and round the trunks of other trees, going right up to their very tops, and raising their own most beautiful feathery ones above theirs. Sometimes they will climb first up one tree and then down it again, and up another, and then down that, till they have climbed up and down several trees, all of them very, very tall. How tall--or rather how _long_--_they_ must be you may think. We say that a snake is so many feet long, not tall, and these rattan-palms are palm-creepers, great vegetable serpents, that twist and coil as they grow, and hug the forest in their great coils, which are larger and more powerful than those of any python or boa-constrictor. A python or a boa-constrictor could not kill a _very_ large animal, but the great palm-snakes will crawl up the largest tree, and crush it and squeeze it till at last it dies and comes thundering down in the forest, and then they will crawl along the ground to another, and hug that to death, too.