shade of strange evergreens; the yellow coconut palms on the nearest
spur of hill throwing back the tender-blue of the higher mountains;
the huge central group of trees--Saman, {81c} Sandbox, {81d} and
Fig, with the bright ostrich plumes of a climbing palm towering
through the mimosa-like foliage of the Saman; and Erythrinas {81e}
(Bois immortelles, as they call them here), their all but leafless
boughs now blazing against the blue sky with vermilion flowers,
trees of red coral sixty feet in height. Ah that we could show you
the avenue on the right, composed of palms from every quarter of the
Tropics--palms with smooth stems, or with prickly ones, with fan
leaves, feather leaves, leaves (as in the wine-palm {82a}) like
Venus's hair fern; some, again, like the Cocorite, {82b} almost
stemless, rising in a huge ostrich plume which tosses in the land
breeze, till the long stiff leaflets seem to whirl like the spokes
of a green glass wheel. Ah that we could wander with you through
the Botanic Garden beyond, amid fruits and flowers brought together
from all the lands of the perpetual summer; or even give you,
through the great arches of the bamboo clumps, as they creak and
rattle sadly in the wind, and the Bauhinias, like tall and ancient
whitethorns, which shade the road, one glance of the flat green
Savannah, with its herds of kine, beyond which lies, buried in
flowering trees, and backed by mountain woods, the city of Port of
Spain. One glance, too, under the boughs of the great Cotton-tree
at the gate, at the still sleeping sea, with one tall coolie ship at
anchor, seen above green cane-fields and coolie gardens, gay with
yellow Croton and purple Dracaena, and crimson Poinsettia, and the
grand leaves of the grandest of all plants, the Banana, food of
paradise. Or, again, far away to the extreme right, between the
flat tops of the great Saman-avenue at the barracks and the wooded
mountain-spurs which rush down into the sea, the islands of the