My Tropic Isle — Edmund James Banfield

But the homely back gate swings over the charred stump of the boorish tree burnt flush with the ground Twelve months and a fortnight after the firing of the shot which did not echo round the world but was merely a local defiant and emphatic promulgation of authority a fire was set to the base of the tree for our tents had been pitched perilously close Space was wanted and moreover its bony imprecating arms long since bereft of beckoning fingers menaced our safety I said it must fall to the north east for the ponderous inclination is in that direction and therein forestalled my experience and delivered the whole camp as hostages into the hands of fortune

The chick which the parent bird has hidden remains a puzzle It moves not it may not blink Its crafty parent has so nibbled and frayed the edges of the decaying brown leaves among which it nestles that it has become absorbed in the scene There is nothing to distinguish between the leaf like feathers and the feather like leaves The instinct of the bird has blotted itself out It is there but invisible and to be discovered only by the critical inspection of every inch of its environment You have found it but not for minutes after its instinct has warned it to possess its soul calmly and not to be afraid So firm is its purpose that if inadvertently you put your foot on its tender body it would not move or utter cry All its faculties are concentrated on impassiveness and thus does Nature guard its weakest and most helpless offspring Tanıtım Bülteninden