At last - 1871 Author:Charles Kingsley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: at tirst in v. iiu, to fix our eyes on some one dominant or typical form, while every form was clamoring, as it were, to be looked at, and a fresh Dryad gaze... more »d out of every bush, and with wooing eyes asked to be wooed again. The first two plants, perhaps, we looked steadily at were the Ipo- mo2a pes caprae, lying along the sand in straight shoots thirty feet long, and growing longer, we fancied, while we looked at it, with large bilobed green leaves at every joint, and here and there a great purple convolvulus flower; and next, what we knew at once for the "shore-grape." We had fancied it (and correctly) to be a mere low bushy tree with roundish leaves. But what a bush ! with drooping boughs, arched over and through each other, shoots already six feet long, leaves as big as the hand shining like dark velvet, a crimson midrib down each, and tiled over each other -- " imbricated," as the botanists would say, in that fashion which gives its peculiar solidity and richness of light and shade to the foliage of an old sycamore; and among these noble shoots and noble leaves, pendent every where, long, tapering spires of green grapes. This shore-grape, which the West Indians esteem as wje might a bramble, we found to be, without exception, the most beautiful broad-leaved plant which we had ever seen. Then we admired the Frangipani, f a tall and almost leafless shrub with thick fleshy shoots, bearing, in this species, white flowers, which have the fragrance peculiar to certain white blossoms, to the jessamine, the tuberose, the orange, the Gardenia, the night-blooming Ce- reus; then the Cacti and aloes; then the first cocoa-nut, with its last year's leaves pale yellow, its new leaves deep Coccolobn uvifera. t Plumieria. Kea-sMe Gnijie. green, and its trunk ringing, when struc...« less