d the excursion was most enjoyable. We drove first through the old
town of Johore, once of considerable importance, and still a place of
trade for opium, indigo, pepper, and other tropical products. Nutmeg
and maize used to be the great articles of export, but latterly the
growth has failed, and, instead of the groves we had expected to see,
there were only solitary trees. After leaving the town we went along a
good road for some distance, with cottages and clearings on either
side, until we came to a pepper and gambir plantation. The two crops
are cultivated together, and both are grown on the edge of the jungle,
for the sake of the wood, which is burned in the preparation of the
gambir. I confess that I had never heard of the latter substance
before, but I find that it is largely exported to Europe, where it is
occasionally employed for giving weight to silks, and for tanning
purposes.

The pepper garden we saw was many acres in extent. Some of the trees
in the forest close by are very fine, especially the camphor-wood, and
the great red, purple, and copper-coloured oleanders, which grow in
clumps twenty and thirty feet in height. The orchids with which all
the trees were covered, hanging down in long tassels of lovely
colours, or spread out like great spotted butterflies and insects,
were most lovely of all. By far the most abundant was the white
phalaenopsis, with great drooping sprays of pure white waxy blossoms,
some delicately streaked with crimson, others with yellow. It was a
genuine jungle, and we were told that it is the resort of numerous
tigers and elephants, and that snakes abound.

On our way back through the town we stopped to see the process of
opium making. This drug is brought from India in an almost raw state,
rolled up in balls, about the size of billiard balls, and wrapped in
its own leaves. Here it is boiled down, several times refined, and
prepared for smoking. The traffic in it forms a very profitable
monopoly, which is shared in Singapore between the English Government
and the Maharajah of Johore.

We also saw indigo growing; the dye is prepared very much in the same
way as the gambir. That grown here is not so good as that which comes
from India, and it is therefore not much exported, though it is used
by the innumerable Chinese in the Malay peninsula to dye all their
clothes, which are invariably of some deep shade of blue. We saw
sago-palms growing, but the mill was not working, so that w