lady who came fresh from the town next day, with nearly a bushel of white branching madrepores, which they were going to carry as coals to Newcastle, six hundred miles down the islands.  Poor Joe tried to sell us a nest of Curacoa baskets for seven shillings; retired after a firm refusal; came up again to R-----, after a couple of hours, and said, in a melancholy and reproachful voice, ’Da—–­ take dem for four shillings and sixpence.  I give dem you.’

But now—.  Would we go on shore?  To the town?  Not we, who came to see Nature, not towns.  Some went off on honest business; some on such pleasure as can be found in baking streets, hotel bars, and billiard-rooms:  but the one place on which our eyes were set was a little cove a quarter of a mile off, under the steep hill, where a white line of sand shone between blue water and green wood.  A few yards broad of sand, and then impenetrable jungle, among which we could see, below, the curved yellow stems of the coconuts; and higher up the straight gray stems and broad fan-leaves of Carat palms; which I regret to say we did not reach.  Oh for a boat to get into that paradise!  There was three-quarters of an hour left, between dinner and dark; and in three-quarters of an hour what might not be seen in a world where all was new?  The kind chief officer, bidding us not trust negro boats on such a trip, lent us one of the ship’s, with four honest fellows, thankful enough to escape from heat and smoke; and away we went with two select companions—­the sportsman and our scientific friend—­to land, for the first time, in the New World.

As we leaped on shore on that white sand, what feelings passed through the heart of at least one of us, who found the dream of forty years translated into fact at last, are best, perhaps, left untold here.  But it must be confessed that ere we had stood for two minutes staring at the green wall opposite us, astonishment soon swallowed up, for the time, all other emotions.  Astonishment, not at the vast size of anything, for the scrub was not thirty feet high; nor at the gorgeous colours, for very few plants or trees were in flower; but at the wonderful wealth of life.  The massiveness, the strangeness, the variety, the very length of the young and still growing shoots was a wonder.  We tried, at first in vain, to fix our eyes on some one dominant or typical form, while every form was clamouring, as it were, to be looked at, and a fresh Dryad gazed out of every bush and with wooing eyes asked to be wooed again.  The first two plants, perhaps, we looked steadily at were the Ipomoea pes caprae, lying along the sand in straight shoots thirty feet long, and growing longer, we fancied, while we looked at it, with large bilobed green leaves at every joint, and here and there a great purple convolvulus flower; and next, what we knew at once for the ‘shore-grape.’ {15a} We had fancied it (and correctly) to be a