island! Its outlines begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings
of color. Shadowy valleys appear, spectral hollows, phantom
slopes of pallid blue or green. The apparition is so like a
mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself one is looking at
real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have
shaped itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many
miles beyond it; and it vanishes into mist again.

... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it
until it materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness
to the islands we have already passed--one dominant height, with
massing of bright crater shapes about it, and ranges of green
hills linked together by low valleys. About its highest summit
also hovers a flock of clouds. At the foot of the vast hill
nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth. The single
salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of
echoes.

Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that
fringes the wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their
base;--it has a curtain of palms before it. Approaching, you
discern only one or two façades above the sea-wall, and the long
wharf projecting through an opening ing in the masonry, over
which young palms stand thick as canes on a sugar plantation.
But on reaching the street that descends towards the heavily
bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy little
burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,
--steep, irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise
of tiny courts everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or
displaying above their stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes