But southern views, though they may be insipid or uncouth in material form and feature, are always sweet with the very soul of passion and poetry. They cry out for you in advance to all sorrow and hopelessness and death,—
“Avaunt thy miscreated front.”
But the low roofs and bright walls of the house we are seeking have discovered us through the trees.
We enter the long, straight avenue of palms interspersed with laden orange-trees, and are met at the door, not by simply the mayoral, as we had expected, but by the son of the proprietor who, contrary to our information, lives here with his family.
We are shown to the sala, the living and dining-room combined. Here sits the pretty, pale mistress sewing on little dresses, while her child of two years totters up to meet us, three large fourths of her comfortable little brown delicious form visible.
Our errand is of course baffled, but we sit talking until the host invites us to visit the grounds. They are large, cultivated with great care and watered by a kind of inundation. Numbers of exotic fruits are shown us among others, well grown American apples, which it has been said, like peaches, will not grow in the tropics. Think of apples nearly ripe in the month of March!
After having made our adieus we turn our horses’ heads towards the wild, primitive-looking forest across the plantation. Directly we find a serpentine path through the dark, rich, reddish-brown soil, the only soil in which oranges and many other tropical fruits will grow; which stains the men’s feet who work in it, or shoes if they have them; browns the oxen, carts, everything that it touches; and which is grateful as “music after howling,” to sun-dazzled eyes.
I have not before been so much impressed by the exquisite contrast of palms and bamboo-trees growing together. The strange, sombre palm, with its erect, uncompromising trunk, its long, straight, dark leaves, looking so doric, so rich in individuality, and then, nestled quite under its very shadow, you often see a clump of the slender willowy, delicate bamboo, its pale green leaves, so soft and fine and feathery. It is the vegetable masculine and feminine attraction. Or it is not unlikely that a stern warrior, and an ethereal post would be drawn together by the same contrasts.
As the path narrows and the forest thickens, these dull things are obscured by densely woven vines, which everywhere hover over these trees, making the forests at times so dense, that it must be a very small bird or breeze to get through them: as for a man, he might as well attempt to wedge his way into the future before the present has cut a way for him.
But we do not care to have night shading these shadows with her black crayons, and so, at the first opening, turn our horses’ heads, and amble homeward, beneath the thrillings of those great ardent hearts up in the blue bosom of the sky; those stars so large and fair that we need no astronomer to suggest that it is only distance which keeps them from being suns.