days of Christmas; and then wandered off the shore up a little path
in the red lava, toward a farm where we expected to see fresh
curiosities, and not in vain. On one side of the path a hedge of
Pinguin (Bromelia)--the plants like huge pine-apple plants without
the fruit--was but three feet high, but from its prickles utterly
impenetrable to man or beast; and inside the hedge, a tree like a
straggling pear, with huge green calabashes growing out of its bark-
-here was actually Crescentia Cujete--the plaything of one's
childhood--alive and growing. The other side was low scrub--prickly
shrubs like acacias and mimosas, covered with a creeping vine with
brilliant yellow hair (we had seen it already from the ship, gilding
large patches of the slopes), most like European dodder. Among it
rose the tall Calotropis procera, with its fleshy gray stems and
leaves, and its azure of lovely lilac flowers, with curious columns
of stamens in each--an Asclepiad introduced from the Old World,
where it ranges from tropical Africa to Afghanistan; and so on, and
so on, up to a little farmyard, very like a Highland one in most
things, want of neatness included, save that huge spotted Trochi
were scattered before the door, instead of buckies or periwinkles;
and in the midst of the yard grew, side by side, the common
accompaniment of a West India kitchen door, the magic trees, whose
leaves rubbed on the toughest meat make it tender on the spot, and
whose fruit makes the best of sauce or pickle to be eaten therewith-
-namely, a male and female Papaw (Carica Papaya), their stems some
fifteen feet high, with a flat crown of mallow-like leaves, just
beneath which, in the male, grew clusters of fragrant flowerets, in
the female, clusters of unripe fruit. On through the farmyard,
picking fresh flowers at every step, and down to a shady cove (for
the sun, even at eight o'clock in December, was becoming
uncomfortably fierce), and again into the shore-grape wood. We had