d no longer. Every
object appeared to be under the training of a watchful solicitude.

A thick grove of olives, with their gnarled and spreading branches and
dark-green leaves, stretched rearward, forming a background to the
picture. Right and left grew clumps of orange and lime trees. Golden
fruit and flowers of brilliant hues mingled with their yellow leaves;
spring and autumn blended upon the same branches!

Rare shrubs--exotics--grew out of large vessels of japanned earthenware,
whose brilliant tints added to the voluptuous colouring of the scene.

A _jet d'eau_, crystalline, rose to the height of twenty feet, and,
returning in a shower of prismatic globules, stole away through a bed of
water-lilies and other aquatic plants, losing itself in a grove of lofty
plantain-trees. These, growing from the cool watery bed, flung out
their broad glistening leaves to the length of twenty feet.

So signs of human life met the eye. The birds alone seemed to revel in
the luxuriance of this tropical paradise. A brace of pea-fowl stalked
over the parterre in all the pride of their rainbow plumage. In the
fountain appeared the tall form of a flamingo, his scarlet colour
contrasting with the green leaves of the water-lily. Songsters were
trilling in every tree. The mock-bird, perched upon the highest limb,
was mimicking the monotonous tones of the parrot. The toucans and
trogons flashed from grove to grove, or balanced their bodies under the
spray of the _jet d'eau_; while the humming-birds hung upon the leaves
of some honeyed blossom, or prinkled over the parterre like straying
sunbeams.

I was running my eye over this dream-like picture, in search of a human
figure, when the soft, metallic accents of a female voice reached me
from the grove of plantains. It was a burst of laughter--clear and
ringing. Then followed another, with short exclamations, and the sound
of water as if dashed and sprinkled with a light hand.

What must be the Eve of a paradise like this! The silver tones were
full of promise. It was the first female voice that had greeted my ears
for a month, and chords long slumbering vibrated under the exquisite
touch.

My heart bounded. My first impulse was "forward", which I obeyed by
springing through the jessamines. But the fear of intruding upon a
scene _a la Diane_ changed my determination, and my next thought was to
make a quiet retreat.

I was preparing to return, and had thrust one leg bac