Limon.” To-day it is a collection of cheap wooden houses and bamboo huts, with wharves, warehouses, and railway shops, surrounded by the most luxurious tropical vegetation, alive with birds of gorgeous plumage, venomous reptiles, and beautiful tiger-cats. Here and there about the place are patches of sugar-cane and groups of cocoa-nut trees, with the wide-spreading bread-fruit that God gave to the tropical savage as He gave rice and maize to his Northern brother, and the slender, graceful rubber-tree, whose frosty-colored mottled trunk looks like the neck of a giraffe. It scarcely casts a shadow; but the banana, with its long pale green plumes, furnishes plenty of shelter for the palm-thatched cabins, the naked babies that play around them, and the half-dressed women who seem always to be dozing in the sun. Surrounding the city for a radius of threescore miles is a jungle full of patriarchal trees, stately and venerable, draped with long moss and slender vines that look like the rigging of a ship. Their limbs are covered with wonderful orchids as bright and radiant as the plumage of the birds, the Espiritu Santo and other rare plants being as plentiful as the daisies in a New England meadow. There is another flower, elsewhere unknown, called the “turn-sol,” which in the morning is white and wax-like, resembling the camellia, but at noon has turned to the most vivid scarlet, and at sunset drops off its stem. This picture is seen from shipboard through a veil of mist--miasmatic vapor--in which the lungs of men find poison, but the air plants food. It reaches from the breasts of the mountains to the foam-fringed shore, broken only by the fleecy clouds that hang low and motionless in the atmosphere, as if they, with all the rest of nature, had sniffed the fragrance of the poppy and sunk to sleep.