means. In the immediate neighborhood of the town are
some English plantations and neat cottages, with inclosures of flowers
and orchards of fruit trees; while still farther back are large gardens
of bread-fruit, nutmegs, cinnamon, pepper, and other spices. Plantations
of sugar-cane, tobacco, and coffee are also numerous, the soil being
pronounced to be extremely fertile. We were told that nothing had to be
wrung from the earth here, but, as Douglas Jerrold said of Australia,
"just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest." Here is the
very paradise of brilliant birds, with feathers "too utterly gaudy,"
while Flora revels in wild luxuriance. The delicate little sensitive
plant here grows in a wild state, equally tremulous and subsiding at
human touch, as with us. Lilies are in wonderful variety, and such
ferns, and such butterflies! These latter almost as big as humming-birds
and as swift of wing.

Penang is the headquarters of the cocoanut-tree, the prolific character
of which is here simply wonderful. How these trees manage to keep an
upright position, with such heavy loads in their tufted tops, is a
never-ending marvel. This tree is always in bearing at Penang, giving
annually several voluntary crops, and receiving no artificial
cultivation. Of the liberal gifts which Providence has bestowed upon the
tropics, the cocoanut-tree is perhaps the most valuable. The Asiatic
poets celebrate in verse the three hundred and sixty uses to which the
trunk, the branches, the leaves, the fruit, and the juice are applied.
In Penang a certain number of these trees are not permitted to bear
fruit; the embryo bud, from which the blossoms and nuts would spring, is
tied up to prevent its expansion, and a small incision then being made
at the end, there oozes in gentle drops a cool, pleasant liquor called
sarce or toddy, which is the palm-wine of the poet. This, when first
drawn, is cooling and wholesome, but when fermented and distilled
produces a strong, intoxicating spirit. In fruits, the banana is perhaps
the next most valuable of the products of this region. We were told that
between twenty and thirty distinct species of the fruit flourished
within a radius of a dozen miles of the town, all wholesome and
palatable. The attention of planters is being diverted from spice
culture to that of fruit raising, the latter requiring so much less
attention, and not being liable to blight of any sort.

In the brief stay which we made