The fibres were of all sizes and in all states of advancement, from the pillars we have just mentioned to small cords which hung down and were about to take root, and thin brown threads still far from the ground, which swayed about with every motion of wind.

In short, it seemed to us that, if there were only space afforded to it, this single tree would at length cover the whole island.
Shortly after this we came upon another remarkable tree, which, as its peculiar formation afterwards proved extremely useful to us, merits description.

It was a splendid chestnut, but its proper name Jack did not know.

However, there were quantities of fine nuts upon it, some of which we put in our pockets.

But its stem was the wonderful part of it.
It rose to about twelve feet without a branch, and was not of great thickness; on the contrary, it was remarkably slender for the size of the tree; but, to make up for this, there were four or five wonderful projections in this stem, which I cannot better describe than by asking the reader to suppose that five planks of two inches thick and three feet broad had been placed round the trunk of the tree, with their _edges_ closely fixed to it, from the ground up to the branches, and that these planks bad been covered over with the bark of the tree and incorporated with it.