opical! It cannot grow beyond this narrow belt of the earth's surface.
Its long, thin body, so straight and so smooth, swathed from the
foot--in a tight bandage of tawny gray, leaving only its deep-green
neck, and over that its crest and plumage of deep-green leaves! It gives
no shade, and bears no fruit that is valued by men. And it has no beauty
to atone for those wants. Yet it has more than beauty--a strange
fascination over the eye and the fancy, that will never allow it to be
overlooked or forgotten. The palm tree seems a kind of _lusus naturae_
to the northern eye--an exotic wherever you meet it. It seems to be
conscious of its want of usefulness for food or shade, yet has a dignity
of its own, a pride of unmixed blood and royal descent--the hidalgo of
the soil.

What are those groves and clusters of small growth, looking like Indian
corn in a state of transmigration into trees, the stalk turning into a
trunk, a thin soft coating half changed to bark, and the ears of corn
turning into melons? Those are the bananas and plantains, as their
bunches of green and yellow fruits plainly enough indicate, when you
come nearer. But, that sad, weeping tree, its long yellow-green leaves
drooping to the ground! What can that be? It has a green fruit like a
melon. There it is again, in groves! I interrupt my neighbor's tenth
cigarrito, to ask him the name of the tree. It is the cocoa! And that
soft green melon becomes the hard shell we break with a hammer. Other
trees there are, in abundance, of various forms and foliage, but they
might have grown in New England or New York, so far as the eye can teach
us; but the palm, the cocoa, the banana and plantain are the
characteristic trees you could not possibly meet with in any other zone.

Thickets--jungles I might call them--abound. It seems as if a bird could
hardly get through them; yet they are rich with wild flowers of all
forms and colors, the white, the purple, the pink, and the blue. The
trees are full of birds of all plumage. There is one like our brilliant
oriole. I cannot hear their notes, for the clatter of the train. Stone
fences, neatly laid up, run across the lands;--not of our cold
bluish-gray granite, the color, as a friend once said, of a miser's eye,
but of soft, warm brown and russet, and well overgrown with creepers,
and fringed with flowers. There are avenues, and here are clumps of the
prim orange tree, with its dense and deep-green polished foliage
gleaming