That, he will say, is Fiddle-wood; that a Carap; that a cedar; that a Roble (oak); that, larger than all you have seen yet, a locust; that a Poui; that a Guatecare; that an Olivier--woods which, he will tell you, are all but incorruptible, defying weather and insects. He will show you, as curiosities, the smaller but intensely hard letter wood lignum-vitæ, and purple heart. He will pass by as useless weeds Ceibas and sandbox-trees, whose bulk appalls you. He will look up, with something like a malediction, at the Matapalos, which every fifty yards have seized on mighty trees, and are enjoying, I presume, every different stage of the strangling art, from the baby Matapalo, who has let down his first air-root along his victim’s stem, to the old sinner whose dark crown of leaves is supported, eighty feet in air, on innumerable branching columns of every size, cross-clasped to each other by transverse bars. The giant tree on which his seed first fell has rotted away utterly, and he stands in its place, prospering in his wickedness, like certain folk whom David knew too well. Your guide walks on with a sneer, but he stops with a smile of satisfaction as he sees lying on the ground dark green glossy leaves, which are fading into a bright crimson, for overhead somewhere there must be a Balata, the king of the forest; and there, close by, is his stem--a madder-brown column, whose head may be a hundred and fifty feet or more aloft. The forester pats the sides of his favorite tree as a breeder might that of his favorite race-horse. He goes on to evince his affection, in the fashion of the West Indians, by giving it a chop with his cutlass, but not in wantonness. He wishes to show you the hidden virtues of this (in his eyes) noblest of trees--how there issues out swiftly from the wound a flow of thick white milk, which will congeal, in an hour’s time, into a gum intermediate in its properties between caoutchouc and gutta-percha. He talks of a time when the English gutta-percha market shall be supplied from the Balatas of the northern hills which can not be shipped away as timber. He tells you how the tree is a tree of a generous, virtuous, and elaborate race--“a tree of God, which is full of sap,” as one said of old of such--and what could he say better, less or more? For it is a Sapota, cousin to the Sapodilla, and other excellent fruit-trees, itself most excellent even in its fruit-bearing power; for every five years it is covered with such a crop of delicious plums that the lazy negro thinks it worth his while to spend days of hard work, besides incurring the penalty of the law (for the trees are government property), in cutting it down for the sake of its fruit.