230 ISLES OF SUMMER. 



extensive scale. Here the branching coral of a large size is very 

 abundant — a variety familiar to all our readers. When taken 

 from the water, it is of a light drab or yellow color, and for 

 a while has a disagreeable odor, both of which it loses when ex- 

 posed for a time to the air and the sunlight. We took the lib- 

 erty to give this "reef a better descriptive name, and, with the 

 l^ermission of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, and of her official 

 representatives in the Bahamas, to call it, '^ Coral Boioers and 

 Grottoes " — for such it literally is. It is the " Marine Garden " 

 enlarged and magnified. It abounded with "wood paths wild," 

 in miniature forests of coral, — dark recesses in groves that 

 gleamed in brightness and beauty — alcoves carved in forms gro- 

 tesque but beautiful, and profusely ornamented — vaulted isles 

 of an architectural design and finish that dwarfed and belittled 

 the products of human skill and genius — cave openings, elabo- 

 rately wrought and strangely configured and adorned, yawning 

 beneath coral banks and bowers wild and endlessly varied — all 

 constituting a vast natural aquarium, the home of large numbers 

 of fish like those seen in the Marine Garden, brilliantly and most 

 gorgeously colored, which bore the same relation to the little 

 aquariums that man makes that the vast and magnificent tropi- 

 cal forests, clothed in perennial green, adorned with graceful 

 vines, teeming with flowers of every hue, and vocal with count- 

 less birds of the most varied and of the richest plumage, bear to 

 a lady's little but luxurious boudoir, with its evergreen branches, 

 climbing vines and captive birds in their small but gilded cages. 

 Turning our eyes upward, surfeited as they were with the truly 

 wonderful display below the surface of the Avater, it was restful 

 to look again at the soft but resplendent beauty of the blue heav- 

 ens, here and there draped w^th light curtains of satin and silver, 

 and at the gem-like setting in the green and blue waters of the 

 islands^ keys and rocks, with their varied outlines and colors 



