Ipomoea
pes caprae, lying along the sand in straight shoots thirty feet
long, and growing longer, we fancied, while we looked at it, with
large bilobed green leaves at every joint, and here and there a
great purple convolvulus flower; and next, what we knew at once for
the 'shore-grape.' {15a} We had fancied it (and correctly) to be a
mere low bushy tree with roundish leaves. But what a bush! with
drooping boughs, arched over and through each other, shoots already
six feet long, leaves as big as the hand shining like dark velvet, a
crimson mid-rib down each, and tiled over each other--'imbricated,'
as the botanists would say, in that fashion, which gives its
peculiar solidity and richness of light and shade to the foliage of
an old sycamore; and among these noble shoots and noble leaves,
pendent everywhere, long tapering spires of green grapes. This
shore-grape, which the West Indians esteem as we might a bramble, we
found to be, without exception, the most beautiful broad-leafed
plant which we had ever seen. Then we admired the Frangipani, {15b}
a tall and almost leafless shrub with thick fleshy shoots, bearing,
in this species, white flowers, which have the fragrance peculiar to
certain white blossoms, to the jessamine, the tuberose, the orange,
the Gardenia, the night-flowering Cereus; then the Cacti and Aloes;
then the first coconut, with its last year's leaves pale yellow, its
new leaves deep green, and its trunk ringing, when struck, like
metal; then the sensitive plants; then creeping lianes of a dozen
different kinds. Then we shrank back from our first glimpse of a
little swamp of foul brown water, backed up by the sand-brush, with
trees in every stage of decay, fallen and tangled into a doleful
thicket, through which the spider-legged Mangroves rose on stilted
roots. We turned, in wholesome dread, to the white beach outside,
and picked up--and, alas! wreck, everywhere wreck--shells--old
friends in the cabinets at home--as earnests to ourselves that all
was not a dream: delicate prickly Pinnae; 'Noah's-arks' in
abundance; great Strombi, their lips and outer shell broken away,
disclosing the rosy cameo within, and looking on the rough beach
pitifully tender and flesh-like; lumps and fragments of coral
innumerable, reminding us by their worn and rounded shapes of those
which abound in so many secondary strata; and then hastened on board
the boat; for the sun had already