ance and beauty amid
these barren rocks, and had enabled them to enjoy those pure and simple
pleasures, which are ever grateful and ever new.

Paul, at twelve years of age, was stronger and more intelligent than
most European youths are at fifteen; and the plantations, which Domingo
merely cultivated, were embellished by him. He would go with the old
negro into the neighbouring woods, where he would root up the young
plants of lemon, orange, and tamarind trees, the round heads of which
are so fresh a green, together with date-palm trees, which produce fruit
filled with a sweet cream, possessing the fine perfume of the orange
flower. These trees, which had already attained to a considerable size,
he planted round their little enclosure. He had also sown the seed of
many trees which the second year bear flowers or fruit; such as the
agathis, encircled with long clusters of white flowers which hang from
it like the crystal pendants of a chandelier; the Persian lilac, which
lifts high in air its gray flax-coloured branches; the pappaw tree,
the branchless trunk of which forms a column studded with green
melons, surmounted by a capital of broad leaves similar to those of the
fig-tree.

The seeds and kernels of the gum tree, terminalia, mango, alligator
pear, the guava, the bread-fruit tree, and the narrow-leaved rose-apple,
were also planted by him with profusion: and the greater number of these
trees already afforded their young cultivator both shade and fruit.
His industrious hands diffused the riches of nature over even the most
barren parts of the plantation. Several species of aloes, the Indian
fig, adorned with yellow flowers spotted with red, and the thorny torch
thistle, grew upon the dark summits of the rocks, and seemed to aim at
reaching the long lianas, which, laden with blue or scarlet flowers,
hung scattered over the steepest parts of the mountain.

I loved to trace the ingenuity he had exercised in the arrangement of
these trees. He had so disposed them that the whole could be seen at a
single glance. In the middle of the hollow he had planted shrubs of
the lowest growth; behind grew the more lofty sorts; then trees of
the ordinary height; and beyond and above all, the venerable and lofty
groves which border the circumference. Thus this extensive enclosure
appeared, from its centre, like a verdant amphitheatre decorated with
fruits and flowers, containing a variety of vegetables, some strips
of meadow land,