and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards,
which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks.
The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to
their photographs; they are presently suffering from
a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent
enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near
to, which they wear as far off as New York. The
potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender
delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies’
lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint,
unless because they are not nearly enough to characterize
the landscape, which in spite of their presence remains
so northern in aspect. They were much whipped
and torn by a late hurricane, which afflicted all
the vegetation of the islands, and some of the royal
palms were blown down. Where these are yet standing,
as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now
quite one-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that
of any king who could pass by them: no sovereign
except Philip of Macedon in his least judicial moments
could pass between them.
The century-plant, which here does not require pampering
under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors
with the other trees of the garden, employs much less
than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom.
It often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time,
and ought to take away the reproach of the inhabitants
for a want of industry and enterprise: a century-plant
at least could do no more in any air, and it merits
praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous
seas. One such must be in bloom at this very
writing, in the garden of a house which this very
writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore
from the steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in
its dim, unknown interior one of the many multiples
of himself which are now pretty well dispersed among
the pleasant places of the earth. It fills the
night with a heavy heliotropean sweetness, and on
the herb beneath, in the effulgence of the waxing
moon, the multiple which has spiritually expropriated
the legal owners stretches itself in an interminable
reverie, and hears Youth come laughing back to it
on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where other
white houses (which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy
underpinning. In this dream the multiple drives
home from the balls of either hotel with the young
girls in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn;
and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the shapes
of flirtation which shall night-long gild the visions
of their sleep with the flash of military and naval
uniforms. Of course the multiple has been at the
dance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances
of forty years ago), and knows enough not to confuse
the uniforms.
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