But our eyes were drawn off, at almost the second glance, from
mountain-peaks and glens to the slopes of cultivated lowland,
sheeted with bright green cane, and guinea-grass, and pigeon pea;
and that not for their own sakes, but for the sake of objects so
utterly unlike anything which we had ever seen, that it was not
easy, at first, to discover what they were. Gray pillars, which
seemed taller than the tallest poplars, smooth and cylindrical as
those of a Doric temple, each carrying a flat head of darkest green,
were ranged along roadsides and round fields, or stood, in groups or
singly, near engine-works, or towered above rich shrubberies which
shrouded comfortable country-houses. It was not easy, as I have
said, to believe that these strange and noble things were trees:
but such they were. At last we beheld, with wonder and delight, the
pride of the West Indies, the Cabbage Palms--Palmistes of the French
settlers--which botanists have well named Oreodoxa, the 'glory of
the mountains.' We saw them afterwards a hundred times in their own
native forests; and when they rose through tangled masses of richest
vegetation, mixed with other and smaller species of palms, their
form, fantastic though it was, harmonised well with hundreds of
forms equally fantastic. But here they seemed, at first sight, out
of place, incongruous, and artificial, standing amid no kindred
forms, and towering over a cultivation and civilisation which might
have been mistaken, seen from the sea, for wealthy farms along some
English shore. Gladly would we have gone on shore, were it but to
have stood awhile under those Palmistes; and an invitation was not
wanting to a pretty tree-shrouded house on a low cliff a mile off,
where doubtless every courtesy and many a luxury would have awaited
us. But it could not be. We watched kind folk rowed to shore
without us; and then turned to watch the black flotilla under our
quarter.

The first thing that caught our eye on board the negro boats which
were alongside was, of course, the baskets of fruits and vegetables,
of which one of us at least had been hearing all his life. At St.
Thomas's we had been introduced to bananas (figs, as they are
miscalled in the West Indies); to the great green oranges, thick-
skinned and fragrant; to those junks of sugar-cane, some two feet
long, which Cuffy and Cuffy's ladies delight to gnaw, walking,
sitting, and standing; increasi