CHAPTER V: A LETTER FROM A WEST INDIAN COTTAGE ORNEE.
30th December 1869.
My Dear-----, We are actually settled in a West Indian country- house, amid a multitude of sights and sounds so utterly new and strange, that the mind is stupefied by the continual effort to take in, or (to confess the truth) to gorge without hope of digestion, food of every conceivable variety.

The whole day long new objects and their new names have jostled each other in the brain, in dreams as well as in waking thoughts.

Amid such a confusion, to describe this place as a whole is as yet impossible.

It must suffice if you find in this letter a sketch or two--not worthy to be called a study--of particular spots which seem typical, beginning with my bathroom window, as the scene which first proved to me, at least, that we were verily in the Tropics.
You look out--would that you did look in fact!--over the low sill.

The gravel outside, at least, is an old friend; it consists of broken bits of gray Silurian rock, and white quartz among it; and one touch of Siluria makes the whole world kin.