It is worth pausing also to ask why small incidents in such an out of the way place as the trackless depths of a primeval forest should remind one of thoughts of friends and their homes in England. The melancholy sound of the wind fluttering the leafy world aloft, and the sad rustle of the foliage reminded me vividly of a night spent at--- House, where I passed half the time listening to the dreadful sighing of the rooky grove, which filled my mind with forlornness and discomfort. Here again, as I lay in my tent, were suggested memories of ocean gales, and general cold, pitiful wretchedness, and when the rain fell in an earnest shower and the heavy fall of raindrops roused the deep and funereal dirge that sounded round about me, it seemed to me I heard sad and doleful echoes of sad and unsatisfied longings, and crowds of unworded thoughts, and past aspirations, unbreathed sentiments of love, friendship, and unuttered sympathies advancing with awful distinctness to the sharpened imagination, until one seemed ready to dissolve in tears and gasp sobbingly, “Oh, my friends, the good God is above all, and knows all things!” These are a few secrets of the woods that one learns in time, even without a mentor in forestry. To know that the Elais palm while requiring moisture requires plenty of sunshine to flourish, that the Raphia palm flourishes best by the sedge-lined swamp and stenchful sewery ooze, that the Calamus palm requires a thick bush for its support, that the Phœnix spinosa thrives best by the waterside, and that the Fan palm is killed by excessive moisture, is not difficult to learn. But for a stranger in tropic woods, accustomed to oak, beech, poplar, and pine, he is somewhat mazed at the unfamiliar leafage above him. By-and-by, however, he can tell at a glance which are the soft and hard woods. There are several families of soft woods, which stand in place of the pine and fir in the tropics, and these have invariably large leaves. It seems to be a rule that the soft woods shall have large leaves, and the hard woods shall have smaller leaves, though they vary according to their degrees of strength and durability. The trees of the Rubiaceæ order, for instance, have leaves almost similar in form and size to the castor-oil plant. The wood is most useful and workable, fit to build fleets of wooden vessels, or to be turned into beautiful domestic utensils--trays, benches, stools, troughs, wooden milk-pots, platters, mugs, spoons, drums, &c. It serves for boarding, ceiling, doors, fences, and palisades. Though it is brittle as cedar it will stand any amount of weather without splitting. There are more than one species of what is known as cotton-wood, but you may know them all by the magnificent buttresses, and their unsurpassed height, by the silver grey of their bark, and by the stiff thorns on their stems, by the white floss of their flowering and grey-green leaves.