^nt CORAL BEDS. ^21 



risible m every direction, while we inhaled, meanwhile an at- 

 mosphere delightfully cooled and medicated by the ocean, and 

 yet sufficiently warm to saturate us with an indolence we could 

 not shako off, and with a feeling of languid and voluptuous ease, 

 satisfaction and content. "We seemed tenants of a new world 

 where ambition is unknown and the passions are either dead or 

 lost in a sleep profound and dreamless. Let not the reader for 

 a moment indulge in any suspicions that this picture is over- 

 drawn, for it is not within the power of any man to so color his 

 descriptions of the coral bowers as to convey any j)roper idea of 

 their marvelous beauty, or to do justice to the original. The 

 most gifted pen can only caricature nature's perfect works. Ho 

 who is not greatly exhilarated, excited and charmed while view- 

 ing the coral beds of the Bahamas, under the favoring circum- 

 stances which we have attempted to describe, is certainly color 

 blind, and, as H. W. Beecher would say, "dead in the eye." In 

 the language of Shakespeare, when speaking of music, ''let no 

 such man be trusted." 



On a charming forenoon in March, 1879, when sailing in the 

 " Gazelle " in a very light wind, we were for the first time be- 

 calmed just as we came to anchor over a large bed of coral to 

 which we were piloted by Capt. Johnson, of the existence of 

 which we were until then ignorant. For half an hour tlie wind 

 faibd to make itself felt, and the water was perfectly smootli 

 and glassy. To our great joy we found that we could stand up- 

 on the deck of our yacht and see, without water glasses or any 

 artificial aid, an extensive tract of corals with their swarms of 

 beautiful fish, and even the shadows of some of them on the 

 white bottom of the harbor, at a distance, we judged, of about 

 twenty-five feet from the surface. Among the corals we observed 

 here, as elsewhere, many algae, gorgonias and sponges growing 

 upon the limestone floor to which they were attached. One 



