April 24.
After several days among the verdure islands with broad, glistening, sandy shores, strewn with large and small shells, I find myself among the Solomon Islands, about 500 miles from New Guinea.
I am glad I came here, for it seems like a dream of the long, long ago. With the exception of a few naked natives, flying foxes, and shore fowls, these islands must resemble the great lake region at home in the carboniferous age. The age after the great Mississippi Valley inland sea had fled away from the shores. The age before the vegetation had lured the sea family through the long reptilean age into the mammalian age, when the mastodon roamed the palm groves of Michigan and the great dinotherium lived on the marshy plains of Colorado, before the Rocky Mountains had raised their now silent, dreary forms.
If there was a day in Illinois when the Crustacean invertebrate families lined the hot ocean shores and the vegetation grew thirty feet high, it must have resembled this equatorial region now, for although clear today, I am told it rains almost daily, and up the mountain sides as far as I can see the vegetation is wonderful.
A sort of inspiration seems to pervade the forests of New Guinea and the Samoa group, but this carboniferous clime has little charm. For although white sand beaches miles wide strewn with shell against a background of waving palms, is a sight long to be remembered, I somehow feel I am associating with clams, turtles and pelicans of the "evening and morning of the fifth day," so I will now leave for Cape York, to catch the Futami Maru, which is to call there May 17th.
COCHIN CHINA
Briefly I must mention the interesting countries of Anam and Siam.
Saigon, a city of Anam, that country which the French gobbled up from the helpless natives, is to me, the most beautiful city in the world.