high; nor at the gorgeous colours, for very few plants or trees were
in flower; but at the wonderful wealth of life. The massiveness,
the strangeness, the variety, the very length of the young and still
growing shoots was a wonder. We tried, at first in vain, to fix our
eyes on some one dominant or typical form, while every form was
clamouring, as it were, to be looked at, and a fresh Dryad gazed out
of every bush and with wooing eyes asked to be wooed again. The
first two plants, perhaps, we looked steadily at were the Ipomoea
pes caprae, lying along the sand in straight shoots thirty feet
long, and growing longer, we fancied, while we looked at it, with
large bilobed green leaves at every joint, and here and there a
great purple convolvulus flower; and next, what we knew at once for
the 'shore-grape.' {15a} We had fancied it (and correctly) to be a
mere low bushy tree with roundish leaves. But what a bush! with
drooping boughs, arched over and through each other, shoots already
six feet long, leaves as big as the hand shining like dark velvet, a
crimson mid-rib down each, and tiled over each other--'imbricated,'
as the botanists would say, in that fashion, which gives its
peculiar solidity and richness of light and shade to the foliage of
an old sycamore; and among these noble shoots and noble leaves,
pendent everywhere, long tapering spires of green grapes. This
shore-grape, which the West Indians esteem as we might a bramble, we
found to be, without exception, the most beautiful broad-leafed
plant which we had ever seen. Then we admired the Frangipani, {15b}
a tall and almost leafless shrub with thick fleshy shoots, bearing,
in this species, white flowers, which have the fragrance peculiar to
certain white blossoms, to the jessamine, the tuberose, the orange,
the Gardenia, the night-flowering Cereus; then the Cacti and Aloes;
then the first coconut, with its last year's leaves pale yellow, its
new leaves deep green, and its trunk ringing, when struck, like