"I read your letter carefully, leaning back in a Maltese boat to present the smallest surface of my body to a grilling sun, and sailing from the _Elba_ to Cape Hamrah, about three miles distant. How we fried and sighed! At last we reached land under Fort Geneva, and I was carried ashore pick-a-back, and plucked the first flower I saw for Annie. It was a strange scene, far more novel than I had imagined; the high, steep banks covered with rich, spicy vegetation, of which I hardly knew one plant. The dwarf palm with fan-like leaves, growing about two feet high, formed the staple of the verdure. As we brushed through them, the gummy leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes: and with its small white flower and yellow heart stood for our English dog-rose. In place of heather, we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves somewhat similar. That large bulb with long flat leaves? Do not touch it if your hands are cut; the Arabs use it as blisters for their horses. Is that the same sort? No, take that one up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair;--and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:--fine hardy thistles, one of them bright yellow, though;--honest, Scotch-looking, large daisies or gowans;--potatoes here and there, looking but sickly; and dark sturdy fig-trees, looking cool and at their ease in the burning sun. "Here we are at Fort Genova, crowning the little point, a small old building due to my old Genoese acquaintance who fought and traded bravely once upon a time. A broken cannon of theirs forms the threshold; and through a dark, low arch we enter upon broad terraces sloping to the centre, from which rain-water may collect and run into that well. Large-breeched French troopers lounge about and are most civil; and the whole party sit down to breakfast in a little white-washed room, from the door of which the long, mountain coastline and the sparkling sea show of an impossible blue through the openings of a white-washed rampart. I try a sea-egg, one of those prickly fellows--sea-urchins, they are called sometimes; the shell is of a lovely purple, and when opened there are rays of yellow adhering to the inside; these I eat, but they are very fishy.