in the brain, in dreams
as well as in waking thoughts. Amid such a confusion, to describe
this place as a whole is as yet impossible. It must suffice if you
find in this letter a sketch or two--not worthy to be called a
study--of particular spots which seem typical, beginning with my
bathroom window, as the scene which first proved to me, at least,
that we were verily in the Tropics.

You look out--would that you did look in fact!--over the low sill.
The gravel outside, at least, is an old friend; it consists of
broken bits of gray Silurian rock, and white quartz among it; and
one touch of Siluria makes the whole world kin. But there the
kindred ends. A few green weeds, looking just like English ones,
peep up through the gravel. Weeds, all over the world, are mostly
like each other; poor, thin, pale in leaf, small and meagre in stem
and flower: meaner forms which fill up for good, and sometimes,
too, for harm, the gaps left by Nature's aristocracy of grander and,
in these Tropics, more tyrannous and destroying forms. So like home
weeds they look: but pick one, and you find it unlike anything at
home. That one happens to be, as you may see by its little green
mouse-tails, a pepper-weed, {77} first cousin to the great black
pepper-bush in the gardens near by, with the berries of which you
may burn your mouth gratis.

So it is, you would find, with every weed in the little cleared
dell, some fifteen feet deep, beyond the gravel. You could not--I
certainly cannot--guess at the name, seldom at the family, of a
single plant. But I am going on too fast. What are those sticks of
wood which keep the gravel bank up? Veritable bamboos; and a
bamboo-pipe, too, is carrying the trickling cool water into the bath
close by. Surely we are in the Tropics. You hear a sudden rattle,
as of boards and brown paper, overhead, and find that it is the
clashing of the huge leaves of a young fan palm, {78a} growing not
ten feet from the window. It has no stem as yet; and the lower
leaves have to be trimmed off or they would close up the path, so
that only the great forked green butts of them are left, bound to
each other by natural matting: but overhead they range out nobly in
leafstalks ten feet long, and fans full twelve feet broad; and this
is but a baby, a three years' old thing. Surely, again, we are in
the Tropics. Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm
leaves, grows a y