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 already discovered, to our pain, that almost everything in the bush had prickles, of all imaginable shapes and sizes; and now, touching a low tree, one of our party was seized as by a briar, through clothes and into skin, and, in escaping, found on the tree (Guilandina, Bonducella) rounded prickly pods, which, being opened, proved to contain the gray horse-nicker-beads of our childhood.

Up and down the white sand we wandered, collecting shells, as did the sailors, gladly enough, and then rowed back, over a bottom of white sand, bedded here and there with the short manati-grass (Thalassia Testudinum), one of the few flowering plants which, like our Zostera, or grass-wrack, grows at the bottom of the sea.  But, wherever the bottom was stony, we could see huge prickly sea-urchins, huger brainstone corals, round and gray, and branching corals likewise, such as, when cleaned, may be seen in any curiosity shop.  These, and a flock of brown and gray pelicans sailing over our head, were fresh tokens to us of where we were.

As we were displaying our nosegay on deck, on our return, to some who had stayed stifling on board, and who were inclined (as West Indians are) at once to envy and to pooh-pooh the superfluous energy of newcome Europeans, R----- drew out a large and lovely flower, pale yellow, with a tiny green apple or two, and leaves like those of an Oleander.  The brown lady, who was again at her post on deck, walked up to her in silence, uninvited, and with a commanding air waved the thing away.  ’Dat manchineel.  Dat poison.  Throw dat overboard.’  R-----, who knew it was not manchineel, whispered to a bystander, ‘Ce n’est pas vrai.’  But the brown lady was a linguist.  ‘Ah! mais c’est vrai,’ cried she, with flashing teeth; and retired, muttering her contempt of English ignorance and impertinence.