e lowest
story there is a great verandah, on which the livingrooms and
bedrooms open. It is commodious, and yet from a broad standpoint it
is without style or distinction. It has none of those Corinthian
pillars which your homesteads in America have. Yet there is in it a
simple elegance. It has no carpets, but a shining mahogany floor,
for there are few carpets in this land of heat. It is a place where
music and mirth and family voices would be fitting; but there are no
family voices here, save such as speak with a negro lisp and
oracularly.

I can hear music at this moment, and inside my castle. It comes
from the irrepressible throats of my cook and my housemaid, who have
more joy in the language of the plantation than you could have in
the songs of St. Angelus. The only person in this castle out of
spirits is its owner.

My castle is embowered in a loose grove of palms and acacias,
pimento shrubs, splendid star-apples, and bully-trees, with wild
lemon, mahogany, dogwood, Jerusalem-thorn, and the waving plumes of
bamboo canes. There is nothing British in it--nothing at all. It
stands on brick pillars, is reached by a stair of marble slabs, and
has a great piazza on the front. You enter a fine, big hall, dark-
you will understand that, though it is not so hot in Virginia, for
the darkness makes for coolness. From the hall the bedrooms open
all round. We are not so barbaric here as you might think, for my
dining-room, which lies beyond the hall, with jalousies or movable
blinds, exposed to all the winds, is comfortable, even ornate.
There you shall see waxlights on the table, and finger-glasses with
green leaves, and fine linen and napkins, and plenty of silver--even
silver wine-coolers, and beakers of fame and beauty, and flowers,
flowers everywhere, and fruit of exquisite charm. I have to live
in outward seeming as do my neighbours, even to keeping a black
footman, gorgeously dressed, with bare legs.

Here at my window grows a wild aloe, and it is in flower. Once only
in fifty years does this aloe flower, and I pick its sweet verdure
now and offer it to you. There it lies, beside this letter that I
am writing. It is typical of myself, for only once has my heart
flowered, and it will be only once in fifty years. The perfume of
the flower is like an everlasting bud from the last tree of Time.
See, my Shei