94 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments 
for his lawn. Itis 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 feetin 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 portion 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 
isabundant. With 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 cropping 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 National 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 premises of Mr. Charles Burnside we were shown an 
India rubber tree—one of aclass which, thanks to American 
genius, has proved in modern times to be of incalculable value. 
