boos forty feet high, with stems
as thick as a man's arm. Jungles of the mangrove tree stood up out of
swamps; propped on their interlacing roots as upon a tangle of stilts.
In drier places the noble tamarind sent down its grateful cloud of shade.
Here and there the blossomy tamarisk adorned the roadside. There was a
curious gnarled and twisted black tree, without a single leaf on it.
It might have passed itself off for a dead apple tree but for the fact
that it had a a star-like, red-hot flower sprinkled sparsely over its
person. It had the scattery red glow that a constellation might have
when glimpsed through smoked glass. It is possible that our
constellations have been so constructed as to be invisible through smoked
glass; if this is so it is a great mistake.

We saw a tree that bears grapes, and just as calmly and unostentatiously
as a vine would do it. We saw an India-rubber tree, but out of season,
possibly, so there were no shoes on it, nor suspenders, nor anything that
a person would properly expect to find there. This gave it an
impressively fraudulent look. There was exactly one mahogany tree on the
island. I know this to be reliable, because I saw a man who said he had
counted it many a time and could not be mistaken. He was a man with a
harelip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel.
Such men are all too few.

One's eye caught near and far the pink cloud of the oleander and the
red blaze of the pomegranate blossom. In one piece of wild wood the
morning-glory vines had wrapped the trees to their very tops, and
decorated them all over with couples and clusters of great bluebells--a
fine and striking spectacle, at a little distance. But the dull cedar is
everywhere, and is the prevailing foliage. One does not appreciate how
dull it is until the varnished, bright green attire of the infrequent
lemon tree pleasantly intrudes its contrast. In one thing Bermuda is
eminently tropical--was in May, at least--the unbrilliant, slightly
faded, unrejoicing look of the landscape. For forests arrayed in a
blemishless magnificence of glowing green foliage that seems to exult in
its own existence and can move the beholder to an enthusiasm that will
make him either shout or cry, one must go to countries that have
malignant winters.

We saw scores of colored farmers digging their crops of potatoes and
onions, their wives and children helping--entirely contented and
comfortable, if looks