of boards and brown paper, overhead, and find that it is the clashing of the huge leaves of a young fan palm, {78a} growing not ten feet from the window.  It has no stem as yet; and the lower leaves have to be trimmed off or they would close up the path, so that only the great forked green butts of them are left, bound to each other by natural matting:  but overhead they range out nobly in leafstalks ten feet long, and fans full twelve feet broad; and this is but a baby, a three years’ old thing.  Surely, again, we are in the Tropics.  Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm leaves, grows a young tree, unknown to me, looking like a walnut.  Next to it an orange, covered with long prickles and small green fruit, its roots propped up by a semi-cylindrical balk of timber, furry inside, which would puzzle a Hampshire woodsman; for it is, plainly, a groo-groo or a coco-palm, split down the middle.  Surely, again, we are in the Tropics.  Beyond it, again, blaze great orange and yellow flowers, with long stamens, and pistil curving upwards out of them.  They belong to a twining, scrambling bush, with finely-pinnated mimosa leaves.  That is the ‘Flower-fence,’ {78b} so often heard of in past years; and round it hurries to and fro a great orange butterfly, larger seemingly than any English kind.  Next to it is a row of Hibiscus shrubs, with broad crimson flowers; then a row of young Screw-pines, {78c} from the East Indian Islands, like spiral pine-apple plants twenty feet high standing on stilts.  Yes:  surely we are in the Tropics.  Over the low roof (for the cottage is all of one storey) of purple and brown and white shingles, baking in the sun, rises a tall tree, which looks (as so many do here) like a walnut, but is not one.  It is the ‘Poui’ of the Indians, {78d} and will be covered shortly with brilliant saffron flowers.

I turn my chair and look into the weedy dell.  The ground on the opposite slope (slopes are, you must remember, here as steep as house-roofs, the last spurs of true mountains) is covered with a grass like tall rye-grass, but growing in tufts.  That is the famous Guinea-grass {78e} which, introduced from Africa, has spread over the whole West Indies.  Dark lithe coolie prisoners, one a gentle young fellow, with soft beseeching eyes, and ‘Felon’ printed on the back of his shirt, are cutting it for the horses, under the guard of a mulatto turnkey, a tall, steadfast, dignified man; and between us and them are growing along the edge of the gutter, veritable pine-apples in the open air, and a low green tree just like an apple, which is a Guava; and a tall stick, thirty feet high, with a flat top of gigantic curly horse-chestnut leaves, which is a Trumpet-tree. {79a} There are hundreds of them in the mountains round:  but most of them dead, from the intense drought and fires of last year.  Beyond it, again, is a round-headed tree, looking like a huge Portugal laurel, covered with racemes