SOME SUMMER DAYS IN MARTINIQUE.
2QI
roses, honeysuckles, and a hundred other plants, may here be found. The gem of the garden is the lake in its center, surrounded by great trees ; tall palms pierce the leaves above it; a broken stream, tumbling down from the hill, half screening some fern-covered grotto as it falls, plunges into it. It is a small pond, but contains vegetable wonders on its three small islets that at home would be priceless. One island is completely covered with a mound of vines wound about a screw-pine and frangipanni — a tangled mass of jessamine and wild vines of the tropics, spangled with white, red, and yellow flowers. Another, a mere foothold for the tree, contains a "traveler's tree," its magnificent leaves reflected in the lake. The other islet contains more rare plants, wild plantains with golden cups, ferns and flowers, and is further graced bv two very slender areca-palms, exquisitely graceful, shooting upward with stems not larger than one's wrist, and forty feet in height. Their delicate leaves droop above dense clusters of nuts — the famous nuts with which the betel is mixed and chewed by the natives of the East. The low bushes are covered with land-snails, and lizards dart out from every crevice, from under every rock and dead limb, and run up the trunks of trees by scores — lizards of all sorts, sizes, and colors; and they are sluggish, too, and it is easy to catch them. But in searching for snails, I encountered an insect not very agreeable, whose bite is certain fever, sometimes death. Horribly gay is this spicier, the Tarantula, in the long hair that covers body and legs, which serves well to conceal it while waiting for its prey,