bridges at cross-streets, display the value of nineteenth-century
knowledge regarding house-building with a view to coolness as
well as to beauty. The architecture might be described as a
tropicalized Swiss style--Swiss eaves are developed into veranda
roofs, and Swiss porches prolonged and lengthened into beautiful
piazzas and balconies. The men who devised these large cool
halls, these admirably ventilated rooms, these latticed windows
opening to the ceiling, may have lived in India; but the
physiognomy of the town also reveals a fine sense of beauty in
the designers: all that is strange and beautiful in the
vegetation of the tropics has had a place contrived for it, a
home prepared for it. Each dwelling has its garden; each garden
blazes with singular and lovely color; but everywhere and always
tower the palms. There are colonnades of palms, clumps of palms,
groves of palms-sago and cabbage and cocoa and fan palms. You can
see that the palm is cherished here, is loved for its beauty,
like a woman. Everywhere you find palms, in all stages of
development, from the first sheaf of tender green plumes rising
above the soil to the wonderful colossus that holds its head a
hundred feet above the roofs; palms border the garden walks in
colonnades; they are grouped in exquisite poise about the basins
of fountains; they stand like magnificent pillars at either side
of gates; they look into the highest windows of public buildings
and hotels.

... For miles and miles and miles we drive along avenues of
palms--avenues leading to opulent cane-fields, traversing queer
coolie villages. Rising on either side of the road to the same
level, the palms present the vista of a long unbroken double
colonnade of dead-silver trunks, shining tall pillars with deep