182 THE SEA. 



with San Francisco, which he has visited, and Singapore and Sydney, which as yet he 

 hasn't, would, if such writers as Charles Kingsley and Anthony Trollope are to be credited, 

 add Trinidad to the list. Read the former's " Letter from a West Indian Cottage Ornee/' 

 or the latter's description of a ride through the cool woods and sea-shore roads, to be 

 convinced that Trinidad is one of the most charming islands in the whole world. Bamboos 

 keep the cottage gravel path up, and as tubes, carry the trickling, cool water to the cottage 

 bath ; you hear a rattling as of boards or stiff paper outside your window : it is the clashing 

 together of a fan-palm, with leaf-stalks ten feet long and fans more feet wide. The orange, 

 the pine-apple, and the " flower fence " (Poinziana) ; the cocoa-palm, the tall Guinea grass, 

 and the " groo-groos " (a kind of palm: Acrocomia sclerocarpa) ; the silk-cotton tree, the 

 tamarind, and the Rosa del monte bushes twenty feet high, and covered with crimson roses ; 

 tea shrubs, myrtles, and clove-trees intermingle with vegetation common elsewhere. Thus 

 much for a mere chance view. 



The seaman ashore will note many of these beauties ; but his superior officers will see 

 more. The cottage ornee, to which they will be invited, with its lawn and flowering shrubs, 

 tiny specimens of which we admire in hot-houses at home ; the grass as green as that of 

 England, and winding away in the cool shade of strange evergreens ; the yellow cocoa-nut 

 palms on the nearest spur of hill throwing back the tender blue of the distant mountains ; 

 groups of palms, with perhaps Erytkrinas umbrosa (Bois immortelles, they call them in 

 Trinidad), with vermilion flowers trees of red coral, sixty feet high interspersed; a glimpse 

 beyond of the bright and sleeping sea, and the islands of the Bocas " floating in the shining 

 waters," and behind a luxuriously furnished cottage, where hospitality is not a mere name, 

 but a very sound fact; what on earth can man want more? 



Kingsley, in presence of the rich and luscious beauty, the vastness and repose, to be 

 found in Trinidad } sees an understandable excuse for the tendency to somewhat grandiose 

 language which tempts perpetually those who try to describe the tropics, and know well 

 that they can only fail. He says : " In presence of such forms and such colouring as this, 

 one becomes painfully sensible of the poverty of words, and the futility, therefore, of all 

 word-painting; of the inability, too, of the senses to discern and define objects of such 

 vast variety ; of our aesthetic barbarism, in fact, which has no choice of epithets, save such 

 as 'great/ and 'vast/ and 'gigantic;' between such as 'beautiful,' and 'lovely/ and 

 ' exquisite/ and so forth : which are, after all, intellectually only one stage higher than the 

 half-brute 'Wah! wan!' with which the savage grunts his astonishment call it not 

 admiration ; epithets which are not, perhaps, intellectually as high as the ' God is great ! ' 

 of the Mussulman, who is wise enough not to attempt any analysis, either of Nature or 

 of his feelings about her, and wise enough, also ... in presence of the unknown, 

 to take refuge in God/' 



Monkeys of many kinds, jaguars, toucans, wild cats; wonderful ant-eaters, racoons, 

 and lizards; and strange birds, butterflies, wasps, and spiders abound, but none of those 

 animals which resent the presence of man. Happy land ! 



But the gun has fired. H.M.S. Sea is getting all steam up. The privilege of leave 

 cannot last for ever: it is "All aboard!" Whither bound? In the archipelago of the 

 West Indies there are so many points of interest, and so many ports which the sailor of 



