A DESERT FEUIT. 



WHO knows the Mediterranean, knows the prickly 

 pear. Not that that quaint and uncanny-looking cactus, 

 with its yellow blossoms and bristling fruits that seem to 

 grow paradoxically out of the edge of thick fleshy leaves, 

 is really a native of Italy, Spain, and North Africa, where 

 it now abounds on every sun-smitten hillside. Like Mr. 

 Henry James and Mr. Marion Crawford, the Barbary fig, 

 as the French call it, is, in point of fact, an American 

 citizen, domiciled and half naturalised on this side of the 

 Atlantic, but redolent still at heart of its Columbian 

 origin. Nothing is more common, indeed, than to see 

 classical pictures of the Alma-Tadema school not, of 

 course, from the brush of the master himself, who is 

 impeccable in such details, but fair works of decent 

 imitators in which Caia or Marcia leans gracefully in 

 her white stole on one pensive elbow against a marble 

 lintel, beside a courtyard decorated with a Pompeian 

 basin, and overgrown with prickly pear or " American 

 aloes." I need hardly say that, as a matter of plain 

 historical fact, neither cactuses nor agaves were known 

 in Europe till long after Christopher Columbus had 



