Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/175

Rh skill; but I shall carry home with me some small memories which it will be pleasant to possess.

I see in the evenings the Southern Cross slowly rising in a slanting direction, with regard to the horizon; at midnight it stands perpendicularly above it. I went out last night to see it. This lovely constellation shone bright and beautiful amid the tranquil beautiful night. The stars are of the second magnitude, one of them, however, is of the third; but the proportion between them is so perfect, that the whole figure is striking in the highest degree; besides which, the splendid Cross stands solitary in the southern heavens, with its foot almost touching the earth, and its arms extending over it. The whole figure produces a solemn but melancholy effect upon me. A glory is formed above the cross by the stars of Centaur, and the two stars Circinus and Robur, stand like sentinels one on either side.

After midnight the Cross declines towards the right, and thus sinks, by degrees, once more beneath the orb of the earth. The nights are very dark, but the darkness is as if transparent; the air is not felt. There could not be more beautiful nights in Paradise. The beauty of our midsummer in the north of Sweden might emulate it, but in another way.

When I turn from the Southern Cross, and the palm-trees between which it shines, I see in the northern firmament, above a beautiful ceiba-tree in the court, the North Star and the Great Bear.

April 3rd.—I have spent this beautiful morning in the banana groves, which are always to be met with on coffee plantations, sketching the tree, with my favourite fruit and all its little upspringing family around its stem. I found here also flowering cotton-plants in a considerably wild state. The shrub has twisting, irregular stems, coarse lobed leaves of a dark dull green colour. The flower resembles a double mallow, and is of a clear, light