Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/388

Rh to see the places and forest parks in the neighbourhood. Bonaventura is a natural park, and is one of the remarkable features of the place and the south. The splendid live-oaks, growing in groupes and avenues, with their long hanging moss, form on all sides the most beautiful Gothic arcades, and when the evening sun casts his glowing beams through these deep, gloomy vistas, the most lovely effects are produced. The young artists of America ought to come here and study them.

A portion of this beautiful park is being converted into a burial ground, and white marble gravestones raise themselves below the hanging mosses of the live-oaks. This moss vegetation is now in blossom; the blossom is a small green button-like flower of the pentandria class, with a delicate scent. Other magnificent flowers of the south, the magnolia grandiflora, the Cape jasmin, and many others, are now beginning to be generally in bloom, but the scent of these is strong and too powerful for my taste. The scent of the woods is overpowering and not wholesome. Ladies of delicate complexions become flushed and suffer from riding through the woods at this season. The flowers operate upon them like poison. To me they appeared suffocating. What odour is there so pleasant and refreshing as that of our fir-woods, and our lilies of the valley?

To-day, when I went out alone to a little grove in the midst of the plain of sand near the town, I found an abundance of the most beautiful strawberries, and wondered how it could be that the negro children left them in peace. I gathered and tasted them, nay I did not taste them, for they had no sign of taste. They were a kind of spurious strawberry. Another spurious beauty in the green fields of the south is a little, low shrub, a kind of Cactus which is very common, called “the prickly pear,” and which bears a beautiful pale yellow flower, like a single mallow, but which is full of an