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It is more than probable that, long before that period, she will have split up into two provinces the older and southern settlement resembling New South Wales in character, and the more recently occupied northern district, with its semi-tropical industries, forming a half-way house between Australia and India. A country of squatters and planters is naturally Conservative in its politics.
"When a storm rises the big masses o' gulf weed are broken up an' drift on the surface before the wind. A great many semi-tropical fish live on the weed an' the little creatures that make their homes in it, an' so they come followin' it away up here. Then we find them in the traps and by seinin'. We've caught butterfly fish an' parrot fish in the seines up here several times."
Long before midsummer our cloud-shadowed hills were green once more; and I think I see again their beautiful outlines, their steep sides planted with semi-tropical palms and grasses, whilst the more distant peaks are veiled in a sultry haze.
The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow.
Nevertheless, acclimated Californians would no more complain of their daily breeze, however vigorous, than a man would speak disrespectfully of his mother. As in most semi-tropical countries, there is a noticeable difference in temperature between sun and shade.
More than once I have seen tears streaming from the eyes of the Northern visitors, and then, almost in a moment, the same faces wreathed in smiles at some farce in giving out the notices or in taking up the collections. A charming episode in this Florida stay was an excursion up the St. John's River, through beautiful semi-tropical vegetation. But one thing was exceedingly vexatious.
We feasted upon the delicious fruits and vegetables fresh from the trees and earth, and the returning healthy appetite was refreshed by tender venison, wild turkeys and quails from the woods, nutritious and abundant fish and ducks from the lakes and rivers. It was a new heaven and a new earth, full of gladness and semi-tropical luxuries.
Cotton.# Throughout most of the colony the climate is either tropical or semi-tropical, and it is therefore, in its more fertile parts, well suited to the growth of cotton and sugar.
These soils are especially adapted for the growth of oranges, limes, mandarins, mangoes, bananas, pineapples, papaws, custard apples, strawberries, and cape gooseberries in the South; in fact, for nearly every kind of tropical and semi-tropical fruit. Some basaltic soils are occasionally covered with forest in the place of scrub, or a mixture, part scrub and part forest.
If New England is inhospitable and New York freezing, it is only a matter of four days to the sun and the exhilarating air of New Mexico and Arizona, and only five to the oranges and roses of that semi-tropical kingdom by the sea, Southern California.
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