Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/170

Rh beautiful. I returned home late last night from a visit with my hostess. We drove, with uncovered heads, in the open volante, through palm-groves, beneath the vault of heaven, which was flooded with light. The air was delicious and bland, as the purest human kindness.

There are two splendid palm avenues at the plantation of St. Amelia, a hundred trees in a row, I have no doubt. Many of them are just now in bloom. The luxuriant sprays of flowers shoot out like a garland of wings around the stem, a little below the palm-crown, in the most beautiful relationship both to it and the stem. There is another avenue of the tamarind (from the green heads of which the beans are now falling, and which the little negro children eagerly gather, to suck the agreeable acid fruit), and of mango-trees, and a species of acacia, with red berries, from which the negroes make necklaces. There are, in front of the house, many of those trees, with lime-tree-like heads and dark fiery-red flowers, such as I saw on La Plaza de Armas at Havannah; the botanic name of which is Hibiscus tiliacea.

Cuba is an outer court of Paradise, worthy to be studied by the natural historian, the painter, and the poet. The forms and colours of the vegetation seem to typify a transition from earthly life to a freer and a loftier sphere of beauty.

&emsp; Thank God that it is now the commencement of spring in Sweden, and that you can now begin to think about salt-baths, summer and convalescence, and that all around you can begin to live; way-side weeds, butterflies, the little yellow flowers and larks—the cheerful larks, which warble and sing, “Now it is spring-time! now it is spring-time!” Ah! the diffusive joy which spring imparts among us, that—that is not known in this beautiful Cuba.

But—Cuba has beauty enough to make human life