, from a neighbour of my host.

After staying for a day at Hunsur, I drove, on October 22nd, to Titimutty,
a small village on the frontier of Coorg, where I was met by Mr. Rose, of
Hill Grove Estate, who drove me to his plantation near Polibetta, which is
in the Bamboo district previously alluded to as containing about
two-thirds of the European plantations in Coorg. Shortly after leaving
Titimutty we drove through coffee on both sides of the road, and, though I
spent four days in the district, and was constantly on the move, I was
never once out of sight of coffee, as the plantations lie in a continuous
block, and, as they are all thoroughly shaded, sometimes by the original
forest trees, and sometimes by trees planted for shade, the general effect
is that you are travelling through a forest of which coffee is the
underwood--a forest lying on gently undulating ground from which nothing
can be seen of the surrounding country. As the bungalows of the planters
are of course surrounded by coffee and shade trees, they have necessarily
an extremely shut-in appearance. But this rather _triste_ effect might be
obviated (and I have with good effect obviated it in the case of a
bungalow which lies in the centre of an estate of my own in Mysore) by
cutting vistas here and there through the shade trees through which peeps
may be had of distant hills. This may seem to be a point of little
practical value, but, as I have shown in a previous chapter, the amenities
of an estate are of value, and are likely to become more so when the
desirable nature of shade coffee property is more widely known. The
bungalows in the Bamboo district are very comfortable, most of them having
tennis grounds, and if the vistas I have suggested were cut out, their
attractiveness would be much enhanced. But if the Bamboo district has not
the scenic advantages of plantations in other parts of Coorg and in
Mysore, these are much compensated for by the close proximity of one
plantation to another, and I was told that at certain seasons there was
generally a well-attended lawn tennis party on every day of the week.
There is besides, in the centre of the district, a comfortable club where
balls and dances are occasionally given. In short, the Bamboo district has
features of its own which make it entirely different from any planting
district in India. From being so much shut in, it might, at first sight,
be supposed to be not a very healthy district, but I heard no