Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/209

THE SCILLY ISLANDS 203 and from every nook and crevice rare specimens of cacti, sedums, and mesembryanthemums with their orange and purple bloom sprawl over the rocks and run riot among the borders. In the gardens South American aloes throw up their flowering stalks heavy with aromatic fragrance, 20 feet high, and giant dracsenas wave their feathery heads in the balmy breeze. Exotic palms, the bamboo, the sugar-cane, and the cotton plant grow in the open, and tropical mosses and orchids hang from the trees. Outside on the breezy downs one may drink in pure ozone from the Atlantic, and revel in an atmosphere untainted by microbes or bacilli. Wild duck, woodcock, and plover, rest- ing in their migratory flight, crowd the marshes, ponds, and lagoons, and the sea is alive with fish." Such was the Tresco that Mr. Augustus Smith made his home; such it is still in the hands of Mr. Dorrien-Smith. It is certain that when Mr. Smith died in 1872, and was buried at St. Buryan, he left the islands in a far better condition than that in which he had found them; and his memory fully deserves the striking monument of unhewn granite that has been raised to his honour in his island-home. Industrially, we chiefly think of Scilly in con- nection with flowers. At one time there was some active ship-building, and Scilly-made boats had an excellent reputation ; but steam navigation put an end to this. There was also a very lively business in potatoes, at first almost without competition; but this trade has been hit very hard by the Channel Islands, by foreign imports, and by the crushing cost of freights. Vegetable cargoes cost less from the shores of the Mediterranean than they do from Scilly; the foreigner is given every 12