the people weave as they would a hat, were anything but enviable dwellings then. The sling-shooters' sentry-boxes throughout the fields—perches where men or boys sat to pull sets of strings that reached to scarecrows far away—suggested too much of clammy, rheumatic discomfort to seem as picturesque as usual—strange little Malay companion pieces to the same boxes on stilts that one sees perched in the rice-fields of Hizen and the other southern provinces of Japan.
At Tjisoeroepan, at the foot of the mountain, we changed to clumsy djoelies, or sedan-chairs, each borne by four coolies, whose go-as-you-please gait, not one of them keeping step with any other, was especially trying so soon after coming from the enjoyment of the swift, regular, methodical slap-slap tread of the chair-bearers of South China. Despite their churning motion, the way was enjoyable; and, beginning with a blighted and abandoned coffee-plantation at the base of the mountain, we passed through changing belts of vegetation, as by successive altitudes we passed botanically from the tropic to the temperate zone. The bleached skeletons of the old coffee-trees, half-smothered in undergrowth and vines, interested one more than the beautifully ordered and carefully tended young coffee-trees in newer plantations—sad reminders of those good old days before the war (the Achinese war), the deficit, and the blight. Beyond kina limits there were no more clearings, and then the tree-fern appeared wan—skeletons of trees at first, where much thinning out had left them in range of scorching sunlight; but in the shade of greater trees in the thick of the jungle they stood superb—great, splendid, soft,
