CHAPTER XVI.
Warm, grateful hearts, to feeling never cold;
Thus the rough husk, and rind impervious, hide
The luscious Cocoa, with its milky tide."
Spring, with her varying charms, was now every day dispensing some new gift to the earth. The tardiness of her first advance was compensated by the rapidity with which she changed every thing subject to her influence; as a timid child, ripening into the loveliness of womanhood, glides gracefully through those paths, which her feet at first trembled to approach. The period was arriving, when the two most delightful seasons of the year stand, as it were, on each other's boundary, blend their unfinish'd work, dip their pencils in each other's dies, and like the rival goddesses, contend before the sons of earth for the palm of beauty. Even the rude settlement of the children of the forest put on its beautiful garments. They, whom their more fortunate brethren scarcely admitted within the scale of humanity, were not shut out by pitying nature from her smiles, or her exuberance. Through the rich green velvet of her fields, the pure fountains looked up with chrystal eyes, in silent joy. Bolder streams murmured over rocky beds, occasionally falling in cascades, like a restless spirit afflicted with the turmoils, and tossings of the world. Wild flowers expanded their petals,
