BEAUTY OF THE VEGETATION. 47 



Each ride that I took brought more beauties before 

 me; the sterile appearance of the frontier was here 

 exchanged for the most luxuriant and fragrant vegetation. 

 Forests appeared, hung with creepers and scented blossoms; 

 undulating grassy slopes,, with detached and park-like 

 clumps of trees. Here and there the calm silvery water of 

 the bay was seen in the distance through openings in the 

 forest, or under the flat horizontal foliage of the umbrella- 

 acacia, whose graceful shape, combined with the palm, 

 the gigantic euphorbias, and the brilliant Kaffir-boom, 

 formed the characteristics of this bush. Let the admirers 

 of architectural art talk of their edifices and public 

 buildings, they are not equal to a single tree. Bricks 

 and mortar, stones, plaster, chimneys, &c., are heaps of 

 rubbish when compared to a natural forest, every leaf and 

 flower of which is a witness and an evidence of that 

 mighty Power who creates with as much ease the endless 

 worlds about us as the minutest details of vegetable and 

 animal life, the perfect working and machinery of which 

 are more than wonderful. 



The annoyance to which an individual must submit 

 during a voyage over nine thousand miles of ocean is well 

 repaid by a scene of this kind, that scarcely needs its 

 accompaniments of many animated specimens of nature, 

 in the shape of birds, bucks, and monkeys, to enliven it. 

 Still, however, there are some human natures so dead to 

 the purely beautiful, and so entirely fettered to the 

 things less pure, that all the beauty I have so feebly 

 described is passed over unadmired and almost unnoticed ; 

 and the same round and routine is carried on in the leisure 



