The _Morus
multicaulis_ was imported, and the silk-manufacture with it; suddenly
the trees seemed to grow bewildered, they put forth earlier and earlier
in the spring, until they got back to January; the leaves at last fell
so early that the worms died before spinning cocoons, and the whole
enterprise was in a few years abandoned because of this vegetable
insanity.
In spite of the absence of snow and presence of verdure, this falling of
the leaves gives some hint of winter; yet blackbirds and canaries sing
without ceasing. The latter are a variety possessing rather inferior
charms, compared with the domestic species; but they have a pretty habit
of flying away to Pico every night: it was pleasant to sit at sunset
on the high cliffs at the end of the island and watch the little brown
creatures, like fragments of the rock itself, whirled away over the
foaming ocean. The orange-orchards were rather a disappointment; they
suggested quince-trees with more shining leaves; and, indeed, there was
a hard, glossy, coriaceous look to the vegetation generally, which made
us sometimes long for the soft, tender green of more temperate zones.
The novel beauty of the Dabney gardens can scarcely be exaggerated;
each step was a new incursion into the tropics,--a palm, a magnolia, a
camphor-tree, a dragon-tree, suggesting Humboldt and Orotava, a clump
of bamboos or cork-trees, or the startling strangeness of the great
grass-like banana, itself a jungle.
Pages:
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67