CHAPTER XXXIX

YAMS

THE climbing black bryony does not look as if it was an endogen, but if you study its heart-shaped leaves you will see that they have several ribs running from top to bottom, not one middle one branching into a network. Those leaves become in the autumn of a beautiful pale gold, and then a dark purple, almost black. Then it is in its beauty, climbing in the hedges, with bunches of red and yellow berries like jewels. They come from tiny green blossoms, all the six stamens on one plant, all the pistil-bearing flowers on another. Down below the plant has tubers like potatoes, which used to be scraped and made into plasters for bruises, so that it was called Beaten Women's Herb.

It has a tropical relation, almost exactly like it, except that while the English bryony twines in spires from right to left, the South Sea Yam goes from left to right. Yam tubers are as big as vegetable marrows, and taste like chestnuts or sweet potatoes. The negroes and the Polynesians live greatly on them.

Our only nine-stamened English plant is the beautiful pink flowering rush, which grows in rivers, but not very frequently. I have only once seen it, and then it was in

a river in Gloucestershire. It was almost out of blossom, but it was a prize indeed.

The graceful water plantain, standing up in bogs and ditches has white three-petalled six-stamened flowers, and the curious arrow-head, also a water plant, nine-petalled, and with leaves like a barbed arrow. The pond weeds follow. You see the green leaves over black stagnant water, and heads like plantain poking up, first of little green blossoms and then of green seeds.

It is a great leap from these to those splendid trees the palms. The growth of an asparagus is more like that of a palm tree than anything we have here, and I have read that an infant palm, when it is in the state in which we eat asparagus shoots, is more like a wheat sheaf than anything else. Thus the palm tree never forms such firm solid wood as to be of much use, and the inner part is the weakest instead of the strongest. The great body of leaves all grow out together at the top, and enormous and beautiful leaves they are, all in one, spreading out so as to form a glorious crown for the tree, taller than any tree we ever see here.

These unfading palm leaves have always been the tokens of victory. The Bible speaks of them as borne by the martyr host in heaven; and at Christ's entry into Jerusalem the branches strewn in the way are believed to have been those of the palm. On Palm Sunday, through all the south of Europe, palms are carried in procession, solemnly blessed, and laid up with high honour to be kept for the rest of the year.

The palm of Palestine is the date palm, which has feathery leaves, and bears the sweet fruit that is so precious to the Arabs in the desert, forming almost their whole subsistence on long journeys.

It is one of those that can live farthest from the equator; these trees in general can only bear a very hot climate. The only one I ever saw was in a hot-house, a fan-palm, it grew much like a grass, but at the joint, instead of hanging down a streamer, it put out a circular fan with a jagged edge. Some palms have a very few leaves, spreading out like umbrellas, but immense feathers and plumes are the most usual shape. Some are deep green, some silver white on the under side, some fringed with yellow and blue. I cannot tell you half what I have read of their beauty. You must look for it in foreign books, especially those about South America and the South Sea Islands, in which places they grow to the grandest size. That which is best known to us is the cocoa-nut palm, at least its hard round fruits are. Fine fellows, as large as a baby's head, covered with brown fibre, and their shell so hard that it will serve to break a man's head, as the ill-treated elephant showed. At the bottom of the nut are the three spots called the monkey's face, two hard, the third soft as the young plant might have sprouted through it. Piercing this, out flows the delicious cocoa-nut milk, with its nutty flavour, nearly a wine-glass full, even when we have them here after a long voyage.

The Pirijao of South America has the handsomest fruit in the world, egg-shaped, as large as a peach, of a golden colour, shaded with crimson on one side. It grows in clusters of seventy or eighty, like giants' painted grapes, each tree bearing three of these mighty bunches, hanging down under delicate flag-like leaves, curled at the edges, all at the summit of one straight trunk sixty or seventy feet in height. There are seldom seeds in these lovely fruits, which are used by the Indians like potatoes. In fact I believe there is no palm that is not in some way

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useful, and of which the fruit is not wholesome. The stamen-bearing flowers are, in some kinds, very handsome, generally growing like those of their lesser lily-like cousins, in a spathe. They are generally yellowish, and crowded closely together, but now and then they are large and of a dazzling white, hanging down in resplendent garlands.

The bread-fruit tree and the cow tree belong also to this valuable tribe.

CHAPTER XL

REEDS

Do you know any river or pool where grows the great bulrush, with a wavy brown head of small three-stamened chaffy blossoms, dark brown or purple? Fine fellows are they; sometimes known by the name of lung-reed, but I like best to call them bulrushes, and you may know why in one moment, though of course it is not to be supposed that the little reed-woven ark where the infant prophet slept safely, as he floated among the monsters in the Nile waters, could be the same bulrush that we see in our streams. Indeed that was the paper-reed.

No monsters are found in the haunts of our bulrushes; the dragon-flies do indeed flit round them, and settle on their long leaves, to devour their prey, but the other dwellers in their pools are all harmless. The moorhen's damp cradle is found in their shelter, the dabchick swims under their tall leaves with her tiny brood, and the waterrat dives and rises, peering round with keen black eyes.

You little girls have little chance of gathering for yourselves one of the grave mace-bearers of the armies of flags and spears, you must get some big brother, who cares little for wet, to plunge in after them; and most likely he will be glad to make a commotion among all those