But this tree your guide will cut himself; so he leaves a significant mark on his new-found treasure and leads you on through the bush, hewing his way with light strokes right and left, so carelessly that you are inclined to beg him to hold his hand and not destroy in a moment things so beautiful, so curious--things which would be invaluable in an English hothouse. And where are the famous orchids? They perch on every bough and stem; but they are not, with three or four exceptions, in flower in the winter; and if they were, I know nothing about them--at least I know enough to know how little I know. Whosoever has read Darwin’s _Fertilization of Orchids_, and finds in his own reason that the book is true, had best say nothing about the beautiful monsters till he has seen with his own eyes more than his master. And yet even the three or four that are in flower are worth going many a mile to see. In the hothouse they seem almost artificial from their strangeness; but to see them “natural,” on natural boughs, gives a sense of their reality which no unnatural situation can give. Even to look up at them, as one rides by, and to guess what exquisite and fantastic forms may issue, in a few months or weeks, out of those fleshy, often unsightly, leaves, is a strange pleasure--a spur to the fancy which is surely wholesome, if we will but believe that all these things were invented by A Fancy, which desires to call out in us, by contemplating them, such small fancy as we possess; and to make us poets, each according to his power, by showing a world in which, if rightly looked at, all is poetry. Look here at a fresh wonder. Away in front of us a smooth gray pillar glistens on high. You can see neither the top nor the bottom of it. But its color and its perfectly cylindrical shape tell you what it is--a glorious Palmiste; one of those queens of the forest which you saw standing in the fields, with its capital buried in the green cloud and its base buried in that bank of green velvet plumes, which you must skirt carefully round, for they are a prickly dwarf palm, called here Black Roseau. Close to it rises another pillar, as straight and smooth, but one-fourth of the diameter--a giant’s walking-cane. Its head, too, is in the green cloud. But near are two or three younger ones only forty or fifty feet high, and you see their delicate feather heads, and are told that they are Manacques; the slender nymphs which attend upon the forest queen, as beautiful, though not as grand, as she.