428 THIRTY-PIRST EVENING.

erance, succeeded by fruits of high flavour or abundant
nutriment. The insect tribe is multiplied so as to fill
all the air, and many of them astonish by their size
and extraordinary forms, and the splendour of their
hues. The ground is all alive with reptiles, some
harmless, some armed with deadly poisons.

ZL. O, but I should not like that at all.

P. The birds, however, decked in the gayest plumage
conceivable, must give unmixed delight; and a tropical
forest, filled with parrots, macaws, and peacocks,
and enlivened with the gambols of monkeys and other
nimble quadrupeds, must be a very amusing spectacle.
The largest of quadrupeds, too, the elephant, the
rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus, are natives of these
regions; and not only those sublime and harmless
animals, out the terrible hon, the cruel tiger, and all
the most ravenous beasts of prey, are here found in
their greatest bulk and fierceness.

I, That would be worse than the insects and rep-
tiles.

P. The sea, also, is filled with inhabitants of an
immense variety of size and figure; not only fishes,
but tortoises, and all the shelly tribes. The shores
are spread with shells of a beauty unknown to our
coasts ; for %§ would seem as though the influence of
the solar heat penetrated into the farthest recesses of
nature.

ZL, How I should like to ramble on the sea-side
there !

P. But the elements, too, are there upon a grand and
terrific scale. The sky either blazes with intolerable
beams, or pours down rain in irresistible torrents.
The winds swell to furious hurricanes, which often
desolate the whole face of nature in a day. Earth-
quakes rock the ground, and sometimes open it in
chasms, which swallow up entire cities. Storms raise
the waves of the ocean into mountains, and drive them
in a deluge to the land.