;
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'?

We slept that night, some in beds, some in hammocks, some on the
floor, with the rich warm night wind rushing down through all the
house; and then were up once more in the darkness of the dawn, to go
down and bathe at a little cascade, where a feeble stream dribbled
under ferns and balisiers over soft square limestone rocks like the
artificial rocks of the Serpentine, and those--copied probably from
the rocks of Fontainebleau--which one sees in old French landscapes.
But a bathe was hardly necessary. So drenched was the vegetation
with night dew, that if one had taken off one's clothes at the
house, and simply walked under the bananas, and through the tanias
and maize which grew among them, one would