Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/43

 Rh physicians who won a high name in the army, and deserve and honor the stations they occupy. The air was soft as June, and our thin clothes, even to seersucker and linen, were all that we needed, and more. Flowers of every hue and fragrance blossomed along the way.

The cocoa-nut palm abounded, of all heights and ages. The older ones had a smooth bark, made of its own dead leaves, crowned with long, bending branches, made up of spines like ribs going out of a backbone. It begins in these spines, and they seem to grow together as new ones shoot out, so that the trunk is itself a leaf. These leaves hang dead and loose in their upper edges, ragged and gray, but bind the trunk at their juncture. Every new burst of leaves gives a new cincture and a new raggedness. The rains wear off the rags, and the old trees stand smooth in bark, with the rings marked upon the bark of these successive growths of leaves. They are of every height, from a few feet to a hundred.

You see on the ride many tall, wide-branching trees of the acacia tribe, with a light gauze leaf; others of deepest green, and wonderful for shade, which are not unlike the maple in shape, but are denser of color and shade. That is the mango, whose apple even the foreigners put as the front fruit of the world, and which, therefore, may have been the very apple that tempted Eve and ruined Adam.

I have not yet followed the example my first mother and father set me, if this be the fruit, and I can not therefore say how strong was their temptation; for though the leaf be green exceedingly, the time of the mango is not yet. The banyan, orange, banana, and other trees, too numerous to mention, especially when you do not know their names, throng the road to Medillin. The convolvulus, or morning-glory, of every color covers the roadside, with its running vine and flowers. And there, on a little marsh, raises its sweet and lovely cup, the water-lily, blooming here just as deliciously, and just as superior to all rivals, on this January the first, as it will blossom unrivaled in the ponds of New England the July following.