You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is smooth and free from climbers, and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle a dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight, and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree. And what are their species? What are their families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree, when cut, refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around. Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of three or even four different plants.... 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 hot-house 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 perched on bough and stem, as one rides by, and to guess what exquisite and fantastic form 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.