"…we stopped in a grove of bamboos. Among the beauties of the vegetable world, this is conspicuous, from one root or bunch of roots, scores and hundreds of stems arise to the height of sixty or eighty feet, each perfectly straight tapering to the top, feathered with bunches of long narrow leaves and leaning from the center outwards, so that the clump has the shape of a hearse-plume. But in the aspect of the bamboo, there is nothing funereal. It is a bright green, its stems covered with a thin verdant bark, beneath which is the beautiful natural yellow varnish of the cane. This tree is the resort of fireflies. At night they seem like drops of light shaken from the branches."