metal; then the sensitive plants; then creeping lianes of a dozen
different kinds. Then we shrank back from our first glimpse of a
little swamp of foul brown water, backed up by the sand-brush, with
trees in every stage of decay, fallen and tangled into a doleful
thicket, through which the spider-legged Mangroves rose on stilted
roots. We turned, in wholesome dread, to the white beach outside,
and picked up--and, alas! wreck, everywhere wreck--shells--old
friends in the cabinets at home--as earnests to ourselves that all
was not a dream: delicate prickly Pinnae; 'Noah's-arks' in
abundance; great Strombi, their lips and outer shell broken away,
disclosing the rosy cameo within, and looking on the rough beach
pitifully tender and flesh-like; lumps and fragments of coral
innumerable, reminding us by their worn and rounded shapes of those
which abound in so many secondary strata; and then hastened on board
the boat; for the sun had already fallen, the purple night set in,
and from the woods on shore a chorus of frogs had commenced
chattering, quacking, squealing, whistling, not to cease till
sunrise.

So ended our first trip in the New World; and we got back to the
ship, but not to sleep. Already a coal-barge lay on either side of
her, and over the coals we scrambled, through a scene which we would
fain forget. Black women on one side were doing men's work, with
heavy coal-baskets on their heads, amid screaming, chattering, and
language of which, happily, we understood little or nothing. On the
other, a gang of men and boys, who, as the night fell, worked, many
of them, altogether naked, their glossy bronze figures gleaming in
the red lamplight, and both men and women singing over their work in
wild choruses, which, when the screaming cracked voices of the women
were silent, and the really rich tenors of the men had it to