island spread far out to sea. And yet where the fire passed six
months ago, all is now a fresh impenetrable undergrowth of green;
creepers covering the land, climbing up and shrouding the charred
stumps; young palms, like Prince of Wales's feathers, breaking up,
six or eight feet high, among a wilderness of sensitive plants,
scarlet-flowered dwarf Balisiers, {81a} climbing fern, {81b}
convolvuluses of every hue, and an endless variety of outlandish
leaves, over which flutter troops of butterflies. How the seeds of
the plants and the eggs of the insects have been preserved, who can
tell? But there their children are, in myriads; and ere a
generation has passed, every dead gray stem will have disappeared
before the ants and beetles and great wood-boring bees who rumble
round in blue-black armour; the young plants will have grown into
great trees beneath the immeasurable vital force which pours all the
year round from the blazing sun above, and all be as it was once
more. In verity we are in the Tropics, where the so-called 'powers
of nature' are in perpetual health and strength, and as much
stronger and swifter, for good and evil, than in our chilly clime,
as is the young man in the heat of youth compared with the old man
shivering to his grave. Think over that last simile. If you think
of it in the light which physiology gives, you will find that it is
not merely a simile, but a true analogy; another manifestation of a
great physical law.

Thus much for the view at the back--a chance scene, without the
least pretensions to what average people would call beauty of
landscape. But oh that we could show you the view in front! The
lawn with its flowering shrubs, tiny specimens of which we admire in
hothouses at home; the grass as green (for it is now the end of the
rainy season) as that of England in May, winding away into the cool