94 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments 

 for his lawn. It is the fashion here, and a good one it is, to 

 leave the palmistes, a few at least, when the land is cleared, or 

 to plant them near the house, merely on account of their won- 

 derful beauty. One palmiste was pointed out to me in a field 

 near the road, which had been measured by its shadow at noon, 

 and found to be one hundred and fifty-three feet in height. For 

 more than a hundred feet the stem rose straight, smooth and 

 gray. Then three or four spathes of flowers, four or five feet 

 long each, jutted out and upward like; while from below them, 

 as usual, one dead leaf, twenty feet long or more, dangled head- 

 downwards in the breeze. Above them rose, as always, the 

 green jiortion of the stem for some twenty feet; and then the 

 flat crown of feathers, as dark as yew, spread out against the 

 blue sky, looking small enough up there though forty feet at 

 least in breadth. No wonder if the man who possessed such a 

 glorious object dared not destroy it.*' 



In the low, wet, rocky hammocks the scrub or dwarf palmetto 

 is abundant. AVith consummate art nature thus hides her blem- 

 ishes with a countless number of palmetto fans, brightly and 

 beautifully adorned with "living green," and supplemented with 

 a luxuriant growth of flowering shrubs and climbing vines. Is 

 it a croj^ping out and development of the divine in woman 

 when she utilizes the fan to hide her beauties ? The palmetto 

 yields a fibre, from which, when reduced to a pulp, the strong 

 paper is made upon which the bills of the Xational banks are 

 printed. An ingenious gentleman in Washington has lately in- 

 vented a machine by which the tedious process of crushing the 

 fibre by hand is avoided. 



Upon the i)remises of Mr. Charles Burnside we were shown an 

 India rubber tree — one of a class which, thanks to American 

 genius, has proved iu modern times to be of incalculable value. 



