“Oh! I don’t know, sir,” continued Shaddy. “You’ve come out where you wanted to, in the wildest wilds, where the beasts have it all their own way, and they do as they always do, go on eating one another up. Why, I’ve noticed that it isn’t only the birds, beasts, and fishes, but even the trees out here in the forest do just the same.”
“Nonsense!” cried Rob merrily. “Eat one another?”
“Yes, sir; that’s it, rum as it sounds to you. I’ll tell you how it is. A great ball full of nuts tumbles down from one of the top branches of a tree, when it’s ripe, bang on to the hard ground, splits, and the nuts fly out all round, right amongst the plants and rotten leaves. After a bit the nuts begin to swell; then a shoot comes out, and another out of it. Then one shoot goes down into the ground to make roots, and the other goes up to make a tree. They’re all doing the same thing, but one of ’em happens to have fallen in the place where there’s the best soil, and he grows bigger and stronger than the others, and soon begins to smother them by pushing his branches and leaves over them. Then they get spindly and weak, and worse and worse, because the big one shoves his roots among them too; and at last they wither and droop, and die, and rot, and the big strong one regularly eats up with his roots all the stuff of which they were made; and in a few years, instead of there being thirty or forty young trees, there’s only one, and it gets big.”
“Why, Naylor, you are quite a philosopher!” said Brazier, smiling.
“Am I, sir? Didn’t know it; but a man like me couldn’t be out in the woods always without seeing that. Why, you’d think, with such thousands of trees always falling and rotting away, that the ground would be feet deep in leaf mould and decayed wood; but if you go right in the forest you’ll find how the roots eat it up as fast as it’s made.”
“But what about these big trunks?” said Joe, pointing to the fallen trees.
“Them? Well, they’re going into earth as fast as they can, and in a few years there’ll be nothing of ’em left. Why, look at that one; it’s as if it were burning away now,” he continued, pointing to the hole through which Rob had fallen: “that’s nature at work making the tree, now it’s dead, turn into useful stuff for the others to feed on.”
“Yes,” said Brazier, as he broke out a piece of the luminous touchwood, which gleamed in the darkness when it was screened from the fire: “that’s a kind of phosphoric fungus, boys.”
“Looks as if it would burn one’s fingers,” said Joe, handling the beautiful piece of rotten, glowing wood.
“Yes; and so do other things out here,” said Shaddy. “There’s plenty of what I call cold fire; but you’ll soon see enough of that.”