for a bamboo rail one might slip over upon the tree-tops below. Some
Liberian coffee shrubs, some tea, cinchona, and ipecacuanha, and some
heartless English cabbages, are being grown on the hillside, and the
Resident hopes that the State will have a great future of coffee.

The view in all directions was beautiful--to the north a sea of densely
wooded mountains with indigo shadows in their hollows; to the south the
country we had threaded on the Linggi river, forests, and small tapioca
clearings, little valleys where rice is growing, and scars where tin-
mining is going on; the capital, the little town of Serambang with its
larger clearings, and to the west the gleam of the shining sea. In the
absence of mosquitoes we were able to sit out till after dark, a rare
luxury. There was a gorgeous sunset of the gory, furnace kind, which
one only sees in the tropics--waves of violet light rolling up over the
mainland, and the low Sumatran coast looking like a purple cloud amidst
the fiery haze.

Dinner was well cooked, and served with coffee after it, just as at
home. The primitive bath-room was made usable by our eleven servants
and chair-bearers being sent to the hill, where the two gentlemen
mounted guard over them. After dark the Chinamen made the largest
bonfire I ever saw, or at all events the most brilliant, with trunks of
trees and pieces of gum dammar, several pounds in weight, which they
obtained by digging, and this was kept up till daylight, throwing its
splendid glare over the whole hill-top, lighting up the forest, and
bringing the cabin out in all its picturesqueness.

I should have liked to be there some time to study the ways of a tribe
of ants. Near the cabin, under a large tree, there was an ant-dwelling,
not exactly to be called an ant-hill, but a subterranean ant-town,