acclimatised, and alas! weakliest of the party; while he, his little
suite, and the owner of the house slept anywhere upon the floor; on
which, between fatigue and enjoyment of the wild life, I would have
gladly slept myself.

When we turned out before sunrise next morning, I found myself in
perhaps the most charming of all the charming 'camps' of these
forests. Its owner, the warden, fearing the unhealthy air of the
sea-coast, had bought some hundreds of acres up here in the hills,
cleared them, and built, or rather was building, in the midst. As
yet the house was rudimentary. A cottage of precious woods cut off
the clearing, standing, of course, on stilts, contained two rooms,
an inner and an outer. There was no glass in the windows, which
occupied half the walls. Door or shutters, to be closed if the wind
and rain were too violent, are all that is needed in a climate where
the temperature changes but little, day or night, throughout the
year. A table, unpolished, like the wooden walls, but, like them,
of some precious wood; a few chairs or benches, not forgetting, of
course, an American rocking-chair; a shelf or two, with books of law
and medicine, and beside them a few good books of devotion: a
press; a 'perch' for hanging clothes--for they mildew when kept in
drawers--just such as would have been seen in a mediaeval house in
England; a covered four-post bed, with gauze curtains, indispensable
for fear of vampires, mosquitoes, and other forest plagues; these
make up the furniture of such a bachelor's camp as, to the man who
lives doing good work all day out of doors, leaves nothing to be
desired. Where is the kitchen? It consists of half a dozen great
stones under yonder shed, where as good meals are cooked as in any
London kitchen. Other sheds hold the servants and hangers-on, the
horses and mules; and as the establishment grows, more will be
added, and the house itself will probably expand laterally, like a
peripheral Greek temple, by rows of posts, probably of palm-stems
thatched over with wooden shingle or with the leaves of the Timit
{233} palm. If ladies come to inhabit the camp, fresh rooms will be
partitioned off by boardings as high as the eaves, leaving the roof
within open and common, for the sake of air. Soon, no regular
garden, but beautiful flowering shrubs--Crotons, Dracaenas, and
Cereuses, will be planted; great bushes of Bauhinia and blue Petraea
wil