But even in the Tropics the virgin forest, beautiful as it is, is without doubt much less beautiful, both in form and colours, than it might be made.  Without doubt, also, a mere clearing, after a few years, is a more beautiful place than the forest; because by it distance is given, and you are enabled to see the sky, and the forest itself beside; because new plants, and some of them very handsome ones, are introduced by cultivation, or spring up in the rastrajo; and lastly, but not least, because the forest on the edge of the clearing is able to feather down to the ground, and change what is at first a bare tangle of stems and boughs into a softly rounded bank of verdure and flowers.  When, in some future civilisation, the art which has produced, not merely a Chatsworth or a Dropmore, but an average English shrubbery or park, is brought to bear on tropic vegetation, then Nature, always willing to obey when conquered by fair means, will produce such effects of form and colour around tropic estates and cities as we cannot fancy for ourselves.

Mr. Wallace laments (and rightly) the absence in the tropic forests of such grand masses of colour as are supplied by a heather moor, a furze or broom-croft, a field of yellow charlock, blue bugloss, or scarlet poppy.  Tropic landscape gardening will supply that defect; and a hundred plants of yellow Allamanda, or purple Dolichos, or blue Clitoria, or crimson Norantea, set side by side, as we might use a hundred Calceolarias or Geraniums, will carry up the forest walls, and over the tree-tops, not square yards, but I had almost said square acres of richest positive colour.  I can conceive no limit to the effects—­always heightened by the intense sunlight and the peculiar tenderness of the distances—­which landscape gardening will produce when once it is brought to bear on such material as it has never yet attempted to touch, at least in the West Indies, save in the Botanic Garden at Port of Spain.

And thus the little paradise at Tortuga to which we descended to sleep, though cleared out without any regard to art, was far more beautiful than the forest out of which it had been hewn three years before.  The two first settlers regretted the days when the house was a mere palm-thatched hut, where they sat on stumps which would not balance, and ate potted meat with their pocket knives.  But it had grown now into a grand place, fit to receive ladies:  such a house, or rather shed, as those South Sea Island ones which may be seen in Hodges’ illustrations to Cook’s Voyages, save that a couple of bedrooms have been boarded off at the back, a little office on one side, and a bulwark, like that of a ship, put round the gallery.  And as we looked down through the purple gorges, and up at the mountain woods, over which the stars were flashing out blight and fast, and listened to the soft strange notes of the forest birds going to roost, again the thought came over me—­Why should not gentlemen and ladies come to such spots as these to live ’the Gentle Life’?