CHAPTER V: A LETTER FROM A WEST INDIAN COTTAGE ORNEE



30th December 1869.

My Dear-----, We are actually settled in a West Indian country-
house, amid a multitude of sights and sounds so utterly new and
strange, that the mind is stupefied by the continual effort to take
in, or (to confess the truth) to gorge without hope of digestion,
food of every conceivable variety. The whole day long new objects
and their new names have jostled each other in the brain, in dreams
as well as in waking thoughts. Amid such a confusion, to describe
this place as a whole is as yet impossible. It must suffice if you
find in this letter a sketch or two--not worthy to be called a
study--of particular spots which seem typical, beginning with my
bathroom window, as the scene which first proved to me, at least,
that we were verily in the Tropics.

You look out--would that you did look in fact!--over the low sill.
The gravel outside, at least, is an old friend; it consists of
broken bits of gray Silurian rock, and white quartz among it; and
one touch of Siluria makes the whole world kin. But there the
kindred ends. A few green weeds, looking just like English ones,
peep up through the gravel. Weeds, all over the world, are mostly
like each other; poor, thin, pale in leaf, small and meagre in stem
and flower: meaner forms which fill up for good, and sometimes,
too, for harm, the gaps left by Nature's aristocracy of grander and,
in these Tropics, more tyrannous and destroying forms. So like home
weeds they look: but pick one, and you find it unlike anything at