are told, to the Elaters--fire-fly, or skipjack beetles. His grub,
like that of his cousin, our English wire-worm, and his nearer
cousin, the great wire-worm of the sugar-cane, eats into the pith
and marrow of growing shoots; and as the palm, being an endogen,
increases from within by one bud, and therefore by one shoot only,
when that is eaten out nothing remains for the tree but to die. And
so it happens that almost every coconut grove which we have seen has
a sad and shabby look as if it existed (which it really does) merely
on sufferance.

But on this cliff we could see, even with the naked eye, tall Aloes,
gray-blue Cerei like huge branching candelabra, and bushes the
foliage of which was utterly unlike anything in Northern Europe;
while above the bright deep green of a patch of Guinea-grass marked
cultivation, and a few fruit trees round a cottage told, by their
dark baylike foliage, of fruits whose names alone were known to us.

Round Water-island we went, into a narrow channel between steep
green hills, covered to their tops, as late as 1845, with sugar-
cane, but now only with scrub, among which the ruins of mills and
buildings stood sad and lonely. But Nature in this land of
perpetual summer hides with a kind of eagerness every scar which man
in his clumsiness leaves on the earth's surface; and all, though
relapsing into primeval wildness, was green, soft, luxuriant, as if
the hoe had never torn the ground, contrasting strangely with the
water-scene; with the black steamers snorting in their sleep; the
wrecks and condemned hulks, in process of breaking up, strewing the
shores with their timbers; the boatfuls of Negroes gliding to and
fro; and all the signs of our hasty, irreverent, wasteful, semi-
barbarous mercantile system, which we call (for the time being only,