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 will roll their long curved shoots over and over each other; Gardenias fill the air with fragrance; and the Bougain-villia or the Clerodendron cover some arbour with lilac or white racemes.

But this camp had not yet arrived at so high a state of civilisation.  All round it, almost up to the very doors, a tangle of logs, stumps, branches, dead ropes and nets of liane lay still in the process of clearing; and the ground was seemingly as waste, as it was difficult—­often impossible—­to cross.  A second glance, however, showed that, amongst the stumps and logs, Indian corn was planted everywhere; and that a few months would give a crop which would richly repay the clearing, over and above the fact that the whole materials of the house had been cut on the spot, and cost nothing.