inhabited, we are told, by people engaged in business.

But what would--or at least ought to--strike the newcomer's eye with
most pleasurable surprise, and make him realise into what a new
world he has been suddenly translated--even more than the Negroes,
and the black vultures sitting on roof-ridges, or stalking about in
mid-street--are the flowers which show over the walls on each side
of the street. In that little garden, not thirty feet broad, what
treasures there are! A tall palm--whether Palmiste or Oil-palm--has
its smooth trunk hung all over with orchids, tied on with wire.
Close to it stands a purple Dracaena, such as are put on English
dinner-tables in pots: but this one is twenty feet high; and next
to it is that strange tree the Clavija, of which the Creoles are
justly fond. A single straight stem, fifteen feet high, carries
huge oblong-leaves atop, and beneath them, growing out of the stem
itself, delicate panicles of little white flowers, fragrant
exceedingly. A double blue pea {74} and a purple Bignonia are
scrambling over shrubs and walls. And what is this which hangs over
into the road, some fifteen feet in height--long, bare, curving
sticks, carrying each at its end a flat blaze of scarlet? What but
the Poinsettia, paltry scions of which, like the Dracaena, adorn our
hothouses and dinner-tables. The street is on fire with it all the
way up, now in mid-winter; while at the street end opens out a green
park, fringed with noble trees all in full leaf; underneath them
more pleasant little suburban villas; and behind all, again, a
background of steep wooded mountain a thousand feet in height. That
is the Savannah, the public park and race-ground; such as neither
London nor Paris can boast.

One may be allowed to regret that the exuberant loyalty of the