Over high walls you catch sight of jalousies and verandahs, inside which must be most delightful darkness and coolness.

Indeed, one cannot fancy more pleasant nests than some of the little gaily-painted wooden houses, standing on stilts to let the air under the floors, and all embowered in trees and flowers, which line the roads in the suburbs; and which are inhabited, we are told, by people engaged in business.
But what would--or at least ought to--strike the newcomer's eye with most pleasurable surprise, and make him realise into what a new world he has been suddenly translated--even more than the Negroes, and the black vultures sitting on roof-ridges, or stalking about in mid-street--are the flowers which show over the walls on each side of the street.

In that little garden, not thirty feet broad, what treasures there are! A tall palm--whether Palmiste or Oil-palm--has its smooth trunk hung all over with orchids, tied on with wire.

Close to it stands a purple Dracaena, such as are put on English dinner-tables in pots: but this one is twenty feet high; and next to it is that strange tree the Clavija, of which the Creoles are justly fond.

A single straight stem, fifteen feet high, carries huge oblong-leaves atop, and beneath them, growing out of the stem itself, delicate panicles of little white flowers, fragrant exceedingly.