STREETS OF CORAL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2008, 18 August 1892, Page 38

STREETS OF CORAL.

Georgetown, in the West Indies, is a city of Borne little beauty. It is well laid cub with wide, straight avenues that intersect at right angles. One thing that pre-eminently distinguishes it among tropical seaboard towns is its reddish-brown streets. The public highways of all these cities are made from coral sand, mud, and powdered sheik from the ocean bottom. The result 13 seen in white, glaring streets, which reflect the sun's intensely hot rays, and makes everybody feel twice as disagreeable as there is any necessity for.

In Georgetown the mud, coral, and stuff is baked in a large pottery oven, whence ifc issue 3 dark and grateful to the eyes. It makes a splendid covering for the tops of the roads, hard, elastic, and smooth. In the middle of some of the prominent streets canals have been cut, fed with water from a reservoir in the back country. Water lilies grow in the canals, the length of the entire main street being given up to the development of that marvellous plant-, the Victoria Regia. Its great flowers, scarlet and yellow, are as big as a small cabbage, and on its pads, 3ft or 4ft in diameter, a child of sis could safely stand. One turns from a planfc of this kind as from an august Bengal tiger. There is none of its own world with whom to compare it.

— Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires.