ed for my benefit. The
virgin forests and great hills were a perpetual joy, but there was a
tranquil pleasure in the plantation which man's labour had reclaimed
from these. That was a meet place indeed for the meditation of a quiet
hour, and no more grateful refuge can be conceived than such a shady
grove at the height of noon. You must not fancy an expanse of dusty land
lined with prim rows of plants in the formal style of a nursery garden;
but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys, spacious woods of
clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches thinned to cast a
diaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves below. The shrubs
stood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their dark burnished
leaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found their way
down through the vaults of foliage; the groves of Daphne had no more
perfect sheen.

I learned to feel for this gracious place a love only second to that of
the wilder jungle; for nature thus tamed to work side by side with man
loses indeed her austerer charm, but not her calm and dignity: these she
brings with her always to be a glory to the humblest associate of her
labour. Often as I pruned a tree, or stripped its stem of suckers, I
felt the soothing, quickening influence of this partnership, and my
thoughts turned to others who had known a like satisfaction and relief;
to Obermann forgetting his melancholy in the toil of the vintage,
plucking the ripe clusters and wheeling them away as if he had never
known the malady of thought; or to Edward Fitzgerald out with the dawn
among his roses at Little Grange.

Amid these high dreams and simple occupations, time seemed to glide away
like a brimming stream, and the only events that marked the passing of
the years were wayfarings through the country-side, sojournings in
strange, slumbrous native towns, expeditions of wider range to old white
ports of Malabar still dreaming of the forgotten heroes whose story
Camoens sang. After many such journeys the genius of this oriental land
seemed to travel with us, so familiar did every aspect of this simple
Indian life become. Our equipment was of set purpose the patriarchal
gear of native fashion; narrow carts with great lumbering wheels were
covered by matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth of
clean rice-straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath each
yoke went a pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendul