iS 



HA WAIL 



[LETTER II. 



chirimoya, and numberless others, and the slender shafts of the 

 coco palms rising high above them, with their waving plumes 

 and perpetual fruitage, were a perfect festival of beauty. 



In the deep shade of this perennial greenery the people 

 dwell. The foreign houses show a very various individuality. 

 The peculiarity in which all seem to share is, that everything 

 is decorated and festooned with flowering trailers. It is often 

 difficult to tell what the architecture is, or what is house and 

 what is vegetation; for all angles, lattices, balustrades, and 

 verandahs are hidden by jessamine or passion-flowers, or 

 the gorgeous, flame-like Bougainvillea. Many of the dwellings 

 straggle over the ground without an upper story, and have very 

 deep verandahs, through which I caught glimpses of cool, shady 

 rooms, with matted floors. Some look as if they had been 

 transported from the old-fashioned villages of the Connecticut 

 Valley, with their clap-board fronts painted white, and jalousies 

 painted green ; but then the deep verandah in which families 

 lead an open-air life has been added, and the chimneys have 

 been omitted, and the New England severity and angularity 

 are toned down and draped out of sight by these festoons of 

 large-leaved, bright-blossomed, tropical climbing plants. Be- 

 sides the frame houses there are houses built of blocks of a 

 cream-coloured coral conglomerate laid in cement, of adobe, or 

 large sun-baked bricks, plastered ; houses of grass and bamboo ; 

 houses on the ground and houses raised on posts ; but nothing 

 looks prosaic, commonplace, or mean, for the glow and 

 luxuriance of the tropics rest on all. Each house has a large 

 garden or " yard," with lawns of bright perennial green, and 

 banks of blazing, many-tinted flowers, and lines of Dracaena, 

 and other foliage plants, with their great purple or crimson 

 leaves, and clumps of marvellous lilies, gladiolas, ginger, and 

 many plants unknown to me. Fences and walls are altogether 

 buried by passion-flowers, the night-blowing Cereus, and the 

 tropaeolum, mixed with geraniums, fuchsia, and jessamine, 

 which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable pro- 

 fusion. A soft air moves through the upper branches, and the 

 drip of water from miniature fountains falls musically on the 

 perfumed air. This is mid-winter ! The summer, they say, 

 is thermometrically hotter, but practically cooler, because of 

 the regular trades which set in in April, but now, with the 

 shaded thermometer at 8o° and the sky without clouds, the 

 heat is not oppressive. 



The mixture of the neat grass houses of the natives with the 



