s, as veritable a Dutch-oven for
cooking fever in, with as veritable a dripping-pan for the poison
when concocted in the tideless basin below the town, as man ever
invented. And we were not sorry when the superintendent, coming on
board, bade us steam back again out of the port, and round a certain
Water-island, at the back of which is a second and healthier
harbour, the Gri-gri channel. In the port close to the town we
could discern another token of the late famous hurricane, the
funnels and masts of the hapless Columbia, which lies still on the
top of the sunken floating clock, immovable, as yet, by the art of
man.

But some hundred yards on our right was a low cliff, which was even
more interesting to some of us than either the town or the wreck;
for it was covered with the first tropic vegetation which we had
ever seen. Already on a sandy beach outside, we had caught sight of
unmistakable coconut trees; some of them, however, dying, dead, even
snapped short off, either by the force of the hurricane, or by the
ravages of the beetle, which seems minded of late years to
exterminate the coconut throughout the West Indies; belonging, we
are told, to the Elaters--fire-fly, or skipjack beetles. His grub,
like that of his cousin, our English wire-worm, and his nearer
cousin, the great wire-worm of the sugar-cane, eats into the pith
and marrow of growing shoots; and as the palm, being an endogen,
increases from within by one bud, and therefore by one shoot only,
when that is eaten out nothing remains for the tree but to die. And
so it happens that almost every coconut grove which we have seen has
a sad and shabby look as if it existed (which it really does) merely
on sufferance.

But on this cliff we could see, even with the naked eye, tall Aloes,
gray-blue Cerei like huge branching candelabra, and bushes the
foliage of which was utterly unlike anything in Northern Europe;
while above the bright deep green of a patch of Guinea-grass marked
cultivation, and a few fruit trees round a cottage told, by their
dark baylike foliage, of fruits whose names alone were known to us.

Round Water-island we went, into a narrow channel between steep
green hills, covered to their tops, as late as 1845, with sugar-
cane, but now only with scrub, among which the ruins of mills and
buildings stood sad and lonely. But Nature in this land of
perpetual summer hides with a kind of eagerness every scar wh