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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/532

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528
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
Corner of Garden. Doryanthes Datura and native ferns in foreground. Silk oaks and Eucalypti in background.

six feet long, and the huge Amaryllidaceous Doryanthes. There are clumps of beautiful Azaleas, whole hedges of bamboo, and thickets of two Asiatic raspberries ten feet high. On the terraces near the house are dozens of roses, Fuchsias with two-inch trunks, and tangled masses of deliriously scented heliotrope and Mandevilla, besides dozens of the more usual garden plants of temperate zones. The laboratories are nearly hidden by great clumps of pampas grass.

Among the flowers of the garden flit many beautiful humming birds, while up from the valleys below float the mellow, plaintive notes of a thrush—the solitaire. The garden at Cinchona, like all the surrounding region, is free from snakes and from troublesome insects. The native negro people of the Hills are courteous and obliging, and, of course, speak English.

The surroundings of Cinchona, beyond the confines of the garden, are equally interesting. Just north of the house a high knob of the spur rises a hundred feet above it. Then, after dropping 200 feet, to a saddle ten yards wide, at St. Helen's Gap, the ridge continues northward, growing wider and higher, to the Blue Mountain range itself. Southward from the house the ridge drops off abruptly, except on the southeast, so that from the terrace one may look off over the Port Royal Mountains to Kingston Harbor and Port Royal, fifteen miles away and nearly a mile below. East and west of Cinchona are the steep-sided