Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/88

Rh spend a few days with them, to know something of life in the country, which I greatly wished, and to make a closer acquaintance with the bishop's beautiful garden which lies very near their home. I have a little, newly-built house to myself, consisting of two airy rooms. Below the window of my sleeping-room stands a little clump of banana-trees laden with their beautiful fruit, and the light-green ell-broad leaves, which are as soft as velvet, are wafted by the wind, and immediately beyond them roars a little mountain stream. Beyond our little garden, and just opposite to it, I see, within a blue-painted enclosure on a little hill, a group of glorious cocoa-palms, poplars, and bamboo trees, beneath which a fountain falls into a magnificent marble basin. The whole village is composed of gardens with their little dwellings, and beyond them the extensive plain is scattered over with king and cocoa-palms, and trees the names of which I am yet unacquainted with.

The first night that I slept here on my cool camp-bedstead, I heard the stream roaring along, and the banana leaves whispering outside my window, and felt the delicious night-winds around me, like the wings of angels; it was to me enchantingly beautiful, so beautiful that I could scarcely sleep. I was obliged to get up many times to contemplate the heavens and the earth. I thus beheld a constellation of incomparable magnificence and brilliancy ascend above the hill of the cocoa-palms. Could it be the ship Argo or the constellation Sagittarius? I do not as yet know. I am still ignorant what constellations of the southern hemisphere may be seen here. I have not yet met with any one who can tell me. People here think a deal more about trade and pleasure than about the stars. When the blush of morning appeared, amid beautiful gold and rosy clouds, I saw the morning-star standing above the earth wonderfully bright and large. I do not know why, but it produced in me a melancholy effect. It seemed to