THE CORAL BEDS. 231 
visible in 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 shake 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 proper idea of 
their marvelous beauty, or to do justice to the original. The 
most gifted pen can only caricature nature’s perfect works. He 
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 the wind 
failed to make itself felt, and the water was perfectly smooth 
and glassy. To our great joy we found that we could stand up- 
on the deck of our yacht and sce, 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 
