So the fallen tree, still gripping the nutritious bank with a moiety of roots, turned slowly in its fibrous stiffness and directed its life and sap and hopes upward. During the succeeding weeks I watched trunk and branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided, controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach of the tides, leaves sprouted, flowers opened and fruit ripened. Weeks after the last slow invertebrate plodder had made his escape shorewards, the taut liana strand was again crowded with a mass of passing life--a maze of vines and creepers, whose tendrils and suckers reached and curled and pressed onward, fighting for gangway to shore, through days and weeks, as the animal life which preceded them had made the most of seconds and minutes. The half-circle of exposed raw bank became in its turn the center of a myriad activities. Great green kingfishers began at once to burrow; tiny emerald ones chose softer places up among the wreckage of wrenched roots; wasps came and chopped out bits for the walls and partitions of their cells; spiders hung their cobwebs between ratlines of rootlets; and hummingbirds promptly followed and plucked them from their silken nets, and then took the nets to bind their own tiny air-castles. Finally, other interests intervened, and like Jennie and Robert, I gradually forgot the tree that fell without an echo. In the jungle no action or organism is separate, or quite apart, and this thing which came to the three of us suddenly at midnight led by devious means to another magic phase of the shore. A little to the south along my beach is the Edge of the World. At least, it looks very much as I have always imagined that place must look, and I have never been beyond it; so that, after listening to many arguments in courts of law, and hearing the reasoning of bolsheviki, teetotalers, and pacifists, I feel that I am quite reasonable as human beings go. And best of all, it hurts no one, and annoys only a few of my scientific friends, who feel that one cannot indulge in such ideas at the wonderful hour of twilight, and yet at eight o'clock the following morning describe with impeccable accuracy the bronchial semi-rings, and the intricate mosaic of cartilage which characterizes and supports the _membranis tympaniformis_ of _Attila thamnophiloides_; a dogma which halves life and its interests.