suggested
walls. Looking closer, I saw that it was the ruin of a small stone
cottage, roofless, and indescribably swallowed up in the pitiless scrub.
And then, near by, I descried another such ruin, and still another--all,
as it were, sunk in the terrible gloom of the vegetation, as sometimes,
at low tide, one can discern the walls of a ruined village at the bottom
of the sea.

As I struggled on, and my eyes grew accustomed to looking for them, I
detected still more of these ruins, of various shapes and sizes,
impenetrably smothered but a few yards inward on each side of the road.

Evidently I had come upon a long-abandoned settlement, and presently, on
some slightly higher ground to the left, I thought I could make out the
half-submerged walls of a much more ambitious edifice. Looking closer, I
noted, with a thrill of surprise, the beginning of a very narrow path,
not more than a foot wide, leading up through the scrub in its
direction. Narrow as it was, it had clearly been kept open by the
not-infrequent passage of feet. With a certain eerie feeling, I edged my
way into it, and, after following it for a hundred yards or so, found
myself close to the roofless ruin of a spacious stone house with
something of the appearance of an old English manor house. Mullioned
windows, finely masoned, opened in the shattered wall, and an elaborate
stone staircase, in the interstices of which stout shrubs were growing,
gave, or once had given, an entrance through an arched doorway--an
entrance now stoutly disputed by the glistening trunk of a gum-elemi
tree and endless matted rope-like roots of giant vines and creepers that
writhed like serpents over the whole edifice. Forcing my way up this
staircase, I found myself in a stone hall some sixty feet long, at one
end of which yawned a huge fireplace, its flue mounting up through a
finely carved chimney, still standing firmly at the top of the southern
gable. Sockets in the walls, on either side, where massive beams had
once lodged, showed that the building had been in three stories, though
all the floors had fallen in and made a mound of rubble in the centre of
the hall where I stood.

At my entrance something moved furtively out of the fireplace, and shot
with a rustle into the surrounding woods. It looked like a small
alligator, and was indeed an iguana, one of the few reptiles of these
islands.

At the base of a tall fig tree--flourishing in one of the corners, its
dense, wide