f St. George's, fifteen or twenty miles away. Such
hard, excellent roads to drive over are not to be found elsewhere out
of Europe. An intelligent young colored man drove us, and acted as
guide-book. In the edge of the town we saw five or six mountain-cabbage
palms (atrocious name!) standing in a straight row, and equidistant from
each other. These were not the largest or the tallest trees I have ever
seen, but they were the stateliest, the most majestic. That row of
them must be the nearest that nature has ever come to counterfeiting
a colonnade. These trees are all the same height, say sixty feet;
the trunks as gray as granite, with a very gradual and perfect taper;
without sign of branch or knot or flaw; the surface not looking like
bark, but like granite that has been dressed and not polished. Thus all
the way up the diminishing shaft for fifty feet; then it begins to take
the appearance of being closely wrapped, spool-fashion, with gray
cord, or of having been turned in a lathe. Above this point there is an
outward swell, and thence upward for six feet or more the cylinder is a
bright, fresh green, and is formed of wrappings like those of an ear
of green Indian corn. Then comes the great, spraying palm plume, also
green. Other palm trees always lean out of the perpendicular, or have a
curve in them. But the plumb-line could not detect a deflection in any
individual of this stately row; they stand as straight as the colonnade
of Baalbec; they have its great height, they have its gracefulness, they
have its dignity; in moonlight or twilight, and shorn of their plumes,
they would duplicate it.

The birds we came across in the country were singularly tame; even that
wild creature, the quail, would pick around in the grass at ease while
we inspected it and talked about it at leisure. A small bird of the
canary species had to be stirred up with the butt-end of the whip before
it would move, and then it moved only a couple of feet. It is said that
even the suspicious flea is tame and sociable in Bermuda, and will allow
himself to be caught and caressed without misgivings. This should be
taken with allowance, for doubtless there is more or less brag about it.
In San Francisco they used to claim that their native flea could kick a
child over, as if it were a merit in a flea to be able to do that; as if
the knowledge of it trumpeted abroad ought to entice immigration. Such a
thing in nine cases out of ten would be almost sure