So we hunt up a crooked, stump-legged Portuguese gardener, by name Manuel, who takes our heavy baskets, we following down a little glen which grows at once quite dark and sweet and silent.
Through long, freshly cut bamboo poles, streams of water are being carried hither and thither to special spots in the garden, and we stop to watch the trickling, and dip our hands down into its pleasant coolness. Away up through the dark leafage, a mighty royal palm with stern aristocratic grace swings and rattles its great, dead, brown arms—the skeleton of its last year’s growth—beneath the luxuriant crown of this year’s green plumes.
In the thicket, we find the nutmegs, hiding among the delicate foliage of a low-branching tree. Sister reaches among the leaves and pulls off some of the fragrant fruit, and gathers many from the ground. A sense of rare luxuriance comes over us. This gathering of the spices of life from the very ground upon which we tread is intoxicating, and we just begin to understand the causes back of those dark pages of West Indian history, when man first partook of this delirium.
These large-leafed, upright little trees are the Madagascar coffee, and the smaller and more graceful ones, the Java coffee—how they take us back to those happy days and months among the coffee plantations, long ago!—and near by is the friendly banana, so common an object that we pass its torn, drooping leaves with scarcely a thought, but it is worth more than a passing glance, for there is no plant in all the tropics more useful than the banana. It has not only delicious fruit of many sizes and varieties, but it is also cooked as a vegetable, and forms one of the chief sources of the native diet. It is planted, on account of its heavy shade and quick growth, to shade the coffee, while trees of slower growth and more permanent shade are maturing, thus forming a necessary and temporary protection; it is also used for the same purpose among the cacao trees. It is a sort of foster-mother to the cacao, to care for the tender shrub until its real mother, “La Madre del Cacao,” can assume permanent care of its charge. The banana takes so little vitality from the ground that, as protection to the coffee and cacao, it is indispensable. We had some very delicious, green-skinned bananas at several places, and found the small apple banana everywhere.
Manuel leads us on, and stops under a spindling, tall tree, flowering with dainty, pink buds of a delicious odour, and there’s one branch just low enough for Little Blue Ribbons to reach on tiptoe. Does it seem possible that the little brown cloves, rattling in my spice-box at home, could ever have been so fresh and soft and pink? Poor little mummies!
And just see what we are coming to! Did you ever imagine there could be such shade? It’s a tree from the Philippines. We stoop to get under the black leaves, and there the shade is absolutely impenetrable. What an adjustment of things there is in this grand old earth of ours!