The lands are of coral formation, consequently very sterile, although presenting a verdant appearance, caused by artificial fertilizers. Tropical fruits grow the entire year without interruption. Here we find the sugar-apple, alligator-pear, sapodilla-guava, limes, lemons, tamarinds, bananas, and plantain--the cocoa-nut tree, with her tessellated leaves, fanned by the breath of eternal spring-time, and ripening its refreshing fruits to nourish the thirsty residents, who would languish were they not supplied with the juices from fruits. The cocoa sheds its fruit when ripe, endangering the heads of those passing. Parents having children who play under the trees are constantly uneasy, as a full-grown cocoa-nut, falling forty feet, would nearly annihilate a child. They are gathered by means of long poles, attached to the end of which is an iron hook--sometimes with ladders and ropes. To a person who has never visited this island it is almost impossible to imagine that only sixty-five miles from the mainland of Florida is a city so nearly in appearance resembling the Spanish dominions of the Old World--where hardly a sentence of English is heard, business transactions conducted in a foreign language, produce bought and sold, together with fruits from the adjacent islands cried in Spanish by the auctioneers. The wharf is a busy place. Here are vessels from various ports, with the ensigns of different nationalities--schooners, ships, and steamers, carrying from ten tons to many thousand, loaded principally with provisions and lumber. The chief of the Seminoles is among the traders, from his Everglade home, inhabited by the deer, which leaves its "delicate foot-prints" on the margin of the streams, or the "slow-paced bear," which drinks and then leaps across the lagoons in search of prey, or to be captured by his savage enemies. Tiger Tail has come to market with sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbages, venison, honey, and buckskins. The honey is in one of nature's own receptacles--a deer skin, taken from the animal whole, one of the fore-legs being used as a mouth for this natural bottle, containing the captured sweets. He does not cultivate the soil in person. His wives, together with his two negro women, who have never heard of the "Emancipation Act," raise the vegetables, while he and his warriors engage in combat with the untamed beasts that roam in their native wilds, or wage destruction upon the finny inhabitants of the dark, sluggish waters.