[Illustration:  Mr. Richard WRIGHT’S cottage.]

Here is the patate douce, with every kind of sweet-fleshed gourd that loves to gad along the sand—­the citron in its carved net, and the enormous melon, carnation-colored within and dark-green to blackness outside.  The peaches here are golden-pulped, as if trying to be oranges, and are richly bitter, with a dark hint of prussic acid, fascinating the taste like some enchantress of Venice, the pursuit of whom is made piquant by a fancy that she may poison you.  The farther you penetrate this huge idle peninsula, the more its idiosyncrasy is borne in on your mind.  Infinite horizons, “an everlasting wash of air,” the wild pure warmth of Arabia, and heated jungles of dwarf oaks balancing balmy plantations of pine.  Then, toward the sea, the wiry grasses that dry into “salt hay” begin to dispute possession with the forests, and finally supplant them:  the sand is blown into coast-hills, whose crests send off into every gale a foam of flying dust, and which themselves change shape, under pressure of the same winds, with a slower imitation of the waves.  Finally, by the gentlest of transitions, the deserts and the quicksands become the ocean.

[Illustration:  The Senate house.]

The shore melts into the sea by a network of creeks and inlets, edging the territory (as the flying osprey sees it) with an inimitable lacework of azure waters; the pattern is one of looping channels with oval interstices, and the dentellated border of the commonwealth resembles that sort of lace which was made by arranging on glass the food of a silk-spinning worm:  the creature ate and wove, having voracity always before him and Fine Art behind him.  Much of the solider part of the State is made of the materials which enter into glass-manufacture:  a mighty enchanter might fuse the greater portion of it into one gigantic goblet.  A slight approximation to this work of magic is already being carried on.  The tourist who has crossed the lagoons of Venice to see the fitful lights flash up from the glass-furnaces of Murano, will find more than one locality here where leaping lights, crowning low banks of sand, are preparing the crystal for our infant industries in glass, and will remind him of his hours by the Adriatic.  Every year bubbles of greater and greater beauty are being blown in these secluded places, and soon we hope to enrich commerce with all the elegances of latticinio and schmelze, the perfected glass of an American Venice.

But our business is not with the land, but the sea.  Here it lies, basking at our feet, the warm amethystine sea of the South.  It does not boom and thunder, as in the country of the “cold gray stones.”  On the contrary, saturating itself with sunny ease, thinning its bulk over the shoal flat beach with a succession of voluptuous curves, it spreads thence in distance with strands and belts of varied color,