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Here they found no sprites nor demons, nor even men, but a fair, half-tropical verdure and, running wild, great numbers of swine. And then on shoare the iland came Inhabited by hogges, Some Foule and tortoyses there were, They only had one dogge, To kill these swyne, to yield them foode, That little had to eate. Their store was spent and all things scant, Alas! they wanted meate.

A half-tropical forest shadowed the low shores, where the palmetto and the cabbage palm mingled with the oak, the maple, the cypress, the liquid-ambar, the laurel, the myrtle, and the broad glistening leaves of the evergreen magnolia. Here was the haunt of bears, wild-cats, lynxes, cougars, and the numberless deer of which they made their prey.

And among them, and as far as the eye could reach, up into the gorge between the hills, picturesque white garden-houses showed through rifts in the half-tropical foliage, or over hedges of prickly pear and oleander. Fig-trees, a hundred years old, made faded grey blotches amongst the vivid greenery; the pink bloom of apricot was stainless against stained-yellow walls.

Eternal summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy summer sought now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits, now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific.

I am founding a place which, thirty or forty years hence, will be called the old Stowe place.... You can have no idea of this queer country, this sort of strange, sandy, half-tropical dreamland, unless you come to it.

But it was only half-tropical, and further down the way was lined with huge trees resembling the elm. Uruapan was just high enough above the real tropics to be delightful. The attitude of its people, too, was pleasing. If not exactly friendly, they lacked that sour incommunicativeness of the higher plateau.

Even Mr Baird's own American black bear is not so "temperate" in his habits; but loves the half-tropical climate of Florida and Texas quite as much as the cold declivities of the Alleghanies. And how does North America possess more species than any other part of the world?

The gullies are steep and narrow: the heat settles on them like a curse. Through this battered and crippled region, the centre of the Jordan Valley, runs the Jordan Bed, twisting like a big green serpent. A dense half-tropical jungle, haunted by wild beasts and poisonous reptiles and insects, conceals, almost at every point, the down-rushing, swirling, yellow flood.

Though Hilma was only nineteen years old, she was a large girl with all the development of a much older woman. There was a certain generous amplitude to the full, round curves of her hips and shoulders that suggested the precocious maturity of a healthy, vigorous animal life passed under the hot southern sun of a half-tropical country.

The sun of early morning was shining on them through bracing, salt, cool air, and even in the valley the larks were busy, and the mockingbirds, and from every wayside bush the rosy finches were singing. All the world was coming to the exquisite bloom of a half-tropical country.