808 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it still holds its place as the most brilliant and characteristic feature 

 of this highly colored landscape, and it is totally unlike anything which 

 is to be seen anywhere except in a coral sea. 



The water is so perfectly pure and clear that small objects, like 

 shells and star-fish, are visible on the pure white coral sand at a depth 

 of fifty or sixty feet, and the sunlight, which is reflected from the 

 white bottom, gives to the water a vivid green luster, which is totally 

 unlike anything in our familiar conception of water. The whole sur- 

 face of the sound seemed to be illuminated by an intense green, phos- 

 phorescent light, and it looked more like the surface of a gigantic 

 polished crystal of beryl than water. The sky was perfectly clear and 

 cloudless, and overhead it was of a deep blue color ; but near the hori- 

 zon the blue was so completely eclipsed by the vivid green of the 

 water that the complementary color was brought out, and the blue 

 was changed to a lurid pink as intense as that of a November sunset. 

 The white foam which drifted by the vessel on the green water ap- 

 peared as red as carmine, and I afterward found in a voyage through 

 the sounds in a white schooner that the sides of the vessel seemed to 

 have a thin coat of rose-colored paint when seen over the rail against 

 the brilliant green. 



About noon we reached our destination, Green Turtle, a small 

 town on a key of the same name, nearly a hundred and fifty miles 

 from Nassau, the center of the civilization of the islands. As there is 

 no town between Green Turtle and Nassau, and as the only regular 

 connection in the summer-time between Nassau and the rest of the 

 world is a steamer once a month to New York, and as no message 

 from home could reach us in time for a reply by the same steamer, we 

 were more remote from our friends and families than we should have 

 been in the Sandwich Islands. Although one member of our party 

 had been a traveler in Asia and South America, and all but two had 

 lived in Europe, I think that, as we came to anchor in the little harbor 

 at Green Turtle and looked back upon our long journey, our scanty 

 fare and narrow quarters, and thought of the miles of water which 

 lay between us and home, we all felt that we had never before been 

 so far away. As the strict laws of the island do not permit the trans- 

 action of any business on Sunday, we were not allowed to disembark 

 until the next day, and we had plenty of time to examine from the 

 water the new land which we had been so long in reaching. 



We came to anchor in the mouth of a beautiful winding bay, in 

 water about thirty feet deep, but so clear that the vessel seemed to 

 float in air, and the motions of the gigantic star-fishes and sea-urchins 

 could be studied on the white bottom as well as if they were in an 

 aquarium. The shores of the bay are high and rocky and well wooded 

 down to the water's edge, where the vegetation ends in a fringe of 

 mangrove-bushes perched above the pure salt water on their long, 

 stilt-like roots, which arch up from the bottom like the ribs of a great 



