ed States and
has landed in some such town as San Juan de Guatemala or Punta Arenas,
on the Pacific coast of Central America. Everything that meets the eye
seems new, unfamiliar, and, in some subtle, indefinable way,
un-American. The vivid but pale and delicate green of the ocean water;
the slender, fern-headed cocoanut-palms which stand in clumps here and
there along the streets; the feathery Australian pines and dark-green
Indian laurels which shade the naval storehouse and the Marine Hospital;
the masses of tamarind, almond, sapodilla, wild-fig, banana, and
cork-tree foliage in the yards of the white, veranda-belted houses; the
Spanish and Cuban types on the piers and in front of the hotels; the
unfamiliar language which strikes the ear at almost every step--all
suggest a tropical environment and Spanish, rather than American,
influences and characteristics.

The two features of Key West scenery that appear, at first glance, to be
most salient, and that contribute most to the impression of strangeness
and remoteness made by the island as a whole, are, unquestionably, the
color of the water and the character of the vegetation. The ocean in
which the little coral key is set has a vividness and a delicacy of
color that I have never seen equaled elsewhere, and that is not even so
much as suggested by the turbid, semi-opaque water of the Atlantic off
the coast of Massachusetts or New Jersey. It is a clear, brilliant,
translucent green, pale rather than deep in tone, and ranging through
all possible gradations, from the color of a rain-wet lawn to the pure,
delicate, ethereal green of an auroral streamer. Sometimes, in heavy
cloud-shadow, it is almost as dark as the green of a Siberian
alexandrite; but just beyond the shadow, in the full sunshine, it
brightens to the color of a greenish turquoise. In the shallow bay known
as "the bight," the yellowish brown of the marine vegetation on the
bottom blends with the pale green of the overlying water so as to
reproduce on a large scale the tints of a Ural Mountain chrysolite,
while two miles away, over a bank of sand or a white coral reef, the
water has the almost opaque but vivid color of a pea-green satin ribbon.
Even in the gloom and obscurity of midnight, the narrow slit cut through
the darkness by the sharp blade of the Fort Taylor search-light reveals
a long line of green, foam-flecked water. Owing to the very limited
extent of the island, the ocean may be seen at the end