of
sunshine can struggle? Palm-trees! Oh, Moncrieff, what glorious palms! And
there is life upon life there, for the gorgeous trees, not apparently
satisfied with their own magnificence of shape and foliage, must array
themselves in wreaths of dazzling orchids and festoons of trailing
flowers. The fairies _must_ have hung those flowers there? Do not deny it,
Moncrieff!'

And here, in the Botanical Gardens, imagination must itself be dumb--such
a wild wealth of all that is charming in the vegetable and animal
creation.

'Donald, go your own road. Dugald, go yours; let us wander alone. We may
meet again some day. It hardly matters whether we do or not. I'm in a
dream, and I don't think I want to awaken for many a long year.'

I go wandering away from my brothers, away from every one.

A fountain is sending its spray aloft till the green drooping branches of
the bananas and those feathery tree-ferns are everywhere spangled with
diamonds. I will rest here. I wish I could catch a few of those wondrous
butterflies, or even one of those fairylike humming-birds--mere sparks of
light and colour that flit and buzz from flower to flower. I wish I
could--that I--I mean--I--wish--'

'Hullo! Murdoch. Where are you? Why, here he is at last, sound asleep
under an orange-tree!'

It is my wild Highland brothers. They have both been shaking me by the
shoulders. I sit up and rub my eyes.

'Do you know we've been looking for you for over an hour?'

'Ah, Dugald!' I reply, 'what is an hour, one wee hour, in a place like
this?'

We must now go to visit the market-place, and then we are going to the
hotel to dine and sleep.

The market is a wondrously mixed one, and as wondrously foreign and
strange as it is possible to conceive. The gay dresses of the women--some
of whom are as black as an ebony ball; their gaudy head-gear; their
glittering but tinselled ornaments; their round laughing faces, in which
shine rows of teeth as white perhaps as alabaster; the jaunty men folks;
the world of birds and beasts, all on the best of terms with themselves,
especially the former, arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow; the
world of fruit, tempting in shape, in beauty, and in odour; the world of
fish, some of them beautiful enough to have dwelt in the coral caves of
fairyland beneath the glittering sea--some ugly, even hideous enough to be
the creatures of a demon's dream, and some, again, so odd-looking or so
grotesque as to make one smile