A SCENE IN THE TROPICS.

This gorgeous painting brings before you all the luxuriance of tropical vegetation.  Magnolias and palm trees wave their heads proudly, while bananas, oranges, and bread fruit abound in rank profusion.  Here the cane brake stretches away as far as the eye can reach (and to those who are not near-sighted still farther), recalling those beautiful lines of the poet:—­

    “Break, break, break!”

The broad river in the foreground, mountains melting away on the horizon (that’s because they’re volcanic), and the sun broiling and sizzling high up in the heavens, are deliciously blended together.  Our artist, full of perspiration (he can blend better than any man we ever ployed), has seized upon a moment when all Nature seems to say:  ("Steady there, what makes that canvas wriggle so?”)

Notice the warmth of coloring; and see to what a high degree of art the general effect is carried-about 90 deg.  Fahrenheit in the shade.  This picturesque object is an alligator basking in the sun.  Our advice to inexperienced travellers is:  “Let him bask!”

These cotton fields, rice plantations, and the colored member of Congress addressing his constituents on the right, all stamp this scene as unmistakably Southern.

We will cancel the stamp and move on.

In our next we shall find that our artist has given himself more latitude, say about eighty degrees North.

WINTER IN SPITSBERGEN.

Behold these regions of eternal ice and snow—­miles upon miles of frozen real estate.  There is a great ice monopoly here.  All, all is blank; except the ship over in this corner.  She is a prize.  This is the place to buy thermometers; you’ll generally find them going very low.  The weather in this region is mostly day and night, but rather irregularly divided between the two.

You see these people with rough beards and red shirts, looking like New York firemen?  You take one to be MOSE?  You are right—­they are Esquimaux.  They are a tough, and hardy race.  Though not precisely students, they yet consume the midnight oil—­chiefly as a beverage.

This great work is the combined production of thirteen artists; twelve of them, perishing in the attempt, were handsomely buried at our expense; and the survivor is now keeping a bar, for his own consumption, at St. Paul, Minnesota.  He was compelled to lay aside the brush, which accounts for the water in this corner not being frozen, as the contract stipulated.  But this allows the ship to which I referred to float comfortably.

These small buildings are settlements.  They are not so frequent here as in New York or Chicago, where business men inform me they occur about as often as—­once in two years.

“Ice cream for sale,” on this sign, has a flavor of civilization in it.

Woman does not go to the poles here, although one of them is only a few miles distant in a northerly direction, with excellent sleighing.