“At noon the Genius will lead thee to the troely, one leaf of which will defend thee from both sun and rain. And if, in the cool of the evening, thou hast been tempted to stray too far from thy place of abode, and art deprived of light to write down the information thou hast collected, the fire-fly, which thou wilt see in almost every bush around thee, will be thy candle. Hold it over thy pocket-book, in any position which thou knowest will not hurt it, and it will afford thee ample light. And when thou hast done with it, put it kindly back again on the next branch to thee. It will want no other reward for its services.
“When in thy hammock, should the thought of thy little crosses and disappointments, in thy ups and downs through life, break in upon thee, and throw thee into a pensive mood, the owl will bear thee company. She will tell thee that hard has been her fate too; and at intervals, ‘Whip-poor-Will,’ and ‘Willy come go,’ will take up the tale of sorrow. Ovid has told thee how the owl once boasted the human form, and lost it for a very small offence; and were the poet alive now, he would inform thee that ‘Whip-poor-Will’ and ‘Willy come go’ are the shades of those poor African and Indian slaves who died worn out and broken-hearted. They wail and cry ‘Whip-poor-Will,’ ‘Willy come go,’ all night long; and often, when the moon shines, you see them sitting on the green turf, near the houses of those whose ancestors tore them from the bosom of their helpless families, which all probably perished through grief and want, after their support was gone.”
The Essequibo charmed Waterton. “Here the finest green-heart grows, and wallaba, purple-heart, siloabali, sawari, buletre, tauronira, and mora, are met with in vast abundance, far and near, towering up in majestic grandeur, straight as pillars, sixty or seventy feet high, without a knot or branch.
“Traveller, forget for a little while the idea thou hast of wandering further on, and stop and look at this grand picture of vegetable nature; it is a reflection of the crowd thou hast lately been in, and though a silent monitor, it is not a less eloquent one on that account. See that noble purple-heart before thee! Nature has been kind to it. Not a hole, not the least oozing from its trunk, to show that its best days are passed. Vigorous in youthful blooming beauty, it stands, the ornament of these sequestered wilds, and tacitly rebukes those base ones of thine own species who have been hardy enough to deny the existence of Him who ordered it to flourish here.
“Behold that one next to it! Hark! how the hammerings of the red-headed woodpecker resound through its distempered boughs! See what a quantity of holes he has made in it, and how its bark is stained with the drops which trickle down from them! The lightning, too, has blasted one side of it. Nature looks pale and wan in its leaves, and her resources are nearly dried up in its extremities: its sap is tainted; a mortal sickness, slow as a consumption, and as sure in its consequences, has long since entered its frame, vitiating and destroying the wholesome juices there.
“Step a few paces aside, and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora behind it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now lie on the ground in sad confusion, one upon the other, all shattered and fungus-grown, and a prey to millions of insects, which are busily employed in destroying them. One branch of it still looks healthy! Will it recover? No, it cannot: Nature has already run her course, and that healthy-looking branch is only as a fallacious good symptom in him who is just about to die of a mortification, when he feels no more pain and fancies his distemper has left him; it is as the momentary gleam of a wintry sun’s ray close to the western horizon. See! while we are speaking a gust of wind has brought the tree to the ground, and made room for its successor.
“Come further on, and examine that apparently luxuriant tauronira on thy right hand. It boasts a verdure not its own; they are false ornaments it wears; the bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the root to its topmost branch. The succession of fruit which it hath borne, like good cheer in the houses of the great, has invited the birds to resort to it, and they have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants on its branches, which like the distempers vice brings into the human frame, rob it of all its health and vigour; they have shortened its days, and probably in another year they will finally kill it, long before nature intended that it should die.
“Ere thou leavest this interesting scene look on the ground around thee, and see what everything here below must come to.
“Behold that newly-fallen wallaba! The whirlwind has uprooted it in its prime, and it has brought down to the ground a dozen small ones in its fall. Its bark has already begun to drop off! And that heart of mora close by it is fast yielding, in spite of its firm, tough texture.
“The tree which thou passedst but a little ago, and which perhaps has laid over yonder brook for years, can now hardly support itself, and in a few months more it will have fallen into the water.