Short Stories and Essays | Page 9

then that these willows are thick clumps of
oleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of
banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic

cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their
photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and
their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque
effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. The
potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring
which compensates for the lilies' lack, and the palms give no just cause
for complaint, unless because they are not nearly enough to
characterize the landscape, which in spite of their presence remains so
northern in aspect. They were much whipped and torn by a late
hurricane, which afflicted all the vegetation of the islands, and some of
the royal palms were blown down. Where these are yet standing, as
four or five of them are in a famous avenue now quite one-sided, they
are of a majesty befitting that of any king who could pass by them: no
sovereign except Philip of Macedon in his least judicial moments could
pass between them.
The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass,
but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden,
employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. It
often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take
away the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and
enterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it
merits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. One
such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a house
which this very writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore from
the steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior
one of the many multiples of himself which are now pretty well
dispersed among the pleasant places of the earth. It fills the night with a
heavy heliotropean sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the
effulgence of the waxing moon, the multiple which has spiritually
expropriated the legal owners stretches itself in an interminable reverie,
and hears Youth come laughing back to it on the waters kissing the
adjacent shore, where other white houses (which also it inhabits) bathe
their snowy underpinning. In this dream the multiple drives home from
the balls of either hotel with the young girls in the little victorias which
must pass its sojourn; and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the
shapes of flirtation which shall night-long gild the visions of their sleep
with the flash of military and naval uniforms. Of course the multiple

has been at the dance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances of
forty years ago), and knows enough not to confuse the uniforms.

III.
In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly
calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the
cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds,
but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not
so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here,
seven hundred miles from any larger land? Some think, on the stronger
wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that men
brought them. Men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which
swarm about their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and
lovelier birds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the
islands. Still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the
wilder places the catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and
the redbird, and holds its own against them. The little ground-doves
mimic in miniature the form and markings and the gait and mild
behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps not their melancholy cooing.
Nature has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite creatures,
unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which sail over the emerald
shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green upon their
translucent bodies as they trail their meteoric splendor against the
midday sky. Full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak to the
tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot beyond their real bulk;
but it is said their tempers are shorter than they, and they attack fiercely
anything they suspect of too intimate a curiosity concerning their nests.
They are probably the only short-tempered things in the Summer
Islands, where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily
find it again. Sweetness, if not light,