Lesbia listened, enchanted by the picture.
What were Park Lane palaces, and Berkshire manors, the petty splendours
of the architect and the upholsterer, weighed against a world in which
all nature is on a grander scale? Mr. Smithson might give her fine
houses and costly upholstery; but only the Tropic of Cancer could give
her larger and brighter stars, a world of richer colouring, a land of
perpetual summer, nights luminous with fire-flies, gardens in which the
fern and the cactus were as forest trees, and where humming-birds
flashed among the foliage like living flowers; nay, where the flowers
themselves took the forms of the animal world and seemed instinct with
life and motion.
'Yes,' said Mr. Smithson, with his gentlemanlike drawl, 'Spanish America
and the West Indies are delightful places to talk about. There are so
many things one leaves out of the picture--thieves, niggers, jiggers,
snakes, mosquitoes, yellow Jack, creeping, crawling creatures of all
kinds. I always feel very glad I have been to South America.'
'Why?'
'In order that I may never go there again,' replied Mr.
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