This Paradise—­for such it is—­is somewhat too far from the city; and one passes in it few people, save an occasional brown nurse.  But when Port of Spain becomes, as it surely will, a great commercial city, and the slopes of Laventille, Belmont, and St. Ann’s, just above the gardens, are studded, as they surely will be, with the villas of rich merchants, then will the generous gift of English Governors be appreciated and used; and the Botanic Gardens will become a Tropic Garden of the Tuileries, alive, at five o’clock every evening, with human flowers of every hue with human

CHAPTER V:  A LETTER FROM A WEST INDIAN COTTAGE ORNEE

30th December 1869.

My Dear-----, We are actually settled in a West Indian country-house, amid a multitude of sights and sounds so utterly new and 
strange, that the mind is stupefied by the continual effort to take 
in, or (to confess the truth) to gorge without hope of digestion, 
food of every conceivable variety.   The whole day long new objects 
and their new names have jostled each other in the brain, in dreams 
as well as in waking thoughts.   Amid such a confusion, to describe 
this place as a whole is as yet impossible.   It must suffice if you 
find in this letter a sketch or two—­not worthy to be called a 
study—­of particular spots which seem typical, beginning with my 
bathroom window, as the scene which first proved to me, at least, 
that we were verily in the Tropics.

You look out—­would that you did look in fact!—­over the low sill.  The gravel outside, at least, is an old friend; it consists of broken bits of gray Silurian rock, and white quartz among it; and one touch of Siluria makes the whole world kin.  But there the kindred ends.  A few green weeds, looking just like English ones, peep up through the gravel.  Weeds, all over the world, are mostly like each other; poor, thin, pale in leaf, small and meagre in stem and flower:  meaner forms which fill up for good, and sometimes, too, for harm, the gaps left by Nature’s aristocracy of grander and, in these Tropics, more tyrannous and destroying forms.  So like home weeds they look:  but pick one, and you find it unlike anything at home.  That one happens to be, as you may see by its little green mouse-tails, a pepper-weed, {77} first cousin to the great black pepper-bush in the gardens near by, with the berries of which you may burn your mouth gratis.

So it is, you would find, with every weed in the little cleared dell, some fifteen feet deep, beyond the gravel.  You could not—­I certainly cannot—­guess at the name, seldom at the family, of a single plant.  But I am going on too fast.  What are those sticks of wood which keep the gravel bank up?  Veritable bamboos; and a bamboo-pipe, too, is carrying the trickling cool water into the bath close by.  Surely we are in the Tropics.  You hear a sudden rattle, as