Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana plant?  If not, then you have never voyaged to those delusive tropics.  Tropical vegetation, as ordinarily understood by poets and painters, consists entirely of the coco-nut palm and the banana bush.  Do you wish to paint a beautiful picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island, a la Tennyson—­a summer isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea?—­then you introduce a group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very foreground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand at a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics.  Do you desire to create an ideal paradise, a la Bernardin de St. Pierre, where idyllic Virginies die of pure modesty rather than appear before the eyes of their beloved but unwedded Pauls in a lace-bedraped peignoir?—­then you strike the keynote by sticking in the middle distance a hut or cottage, overshadowed by the broad and graceful foliage of the picturesque banana. (’Hut’ is a poor and chilly word for these glowing descriptions, far inferior to the pretty and high-sounding original chaumiere.) That is how we do the tropics when we want to work upon the emotions of the reader.  But it is all a delicate theatrical illusion; a trick of art meant to deceive and impose upon the unwary who have never been there, and would like to think it all genuine.  In reality, nine times out of ten, you might cast your eyes casually around you in any tropical valley, and, if there didn’t happen to be a native cottage with a coco-nut grove and banana patch anywhere in the neighbourhood, you would see nothing in the way of vegetation which you mightn’t see at home any day in Europe.  But what painter would ever venture to paint the tropics without the palm trees?  He might just as well try to paint the desert without the camels, or to represent St. Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived in the calm centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise his Sebastianic personality.

Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with its practically almost identical relation, the plantain, is a real bit of tropical foliage.  I confess to a settled prejudice against the tropics generally, but I allow the sunsets, the coco-nuts, and the bananas.  The true stem creeps underground, and sends up each year an upright branch, thickly covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like those of the canna cultivated in our gardens as ‘Indian shot,’ but far larger, nobler, and handsomer.  They sometimes measure from six to ten feet in length, and their thick midrib and strongly marked diverging veins give them a very lordly and graceful appearance.  But they are apt in practice to suffer much from the fury of the tropical storms.  The wind rips the leaves up between the veins as far as the midrib in tangled tatters; so that after a good hurricane they look more like coco-nut palm leaves than like single broad masses of foliage as they ought