the coast, and amidst the gorges of the Ghauts, with vast heights towering upwards, and almost all around, while the river, which had now sunk to what in English ideas would still seem to be one of considerable size, appeared as if it had just emerged from the navel of a mountain-barrier some miles ahead.  After a few miles more we passed the last hamlet of what was then called the Company’s Country, and leaving the inhabited lands—­if indeed in a European sense they may be called so—­behind us, began to ascend the twenty miles of forest-clad gorges which lead up into the tableland of Mysore.  The ascent was necessarily slow, and it was not till late in the afternoon that I saw, some 500 feet above me, and at a total elevation of about 3,200 feet above sea-level, the white walls of the only planter’s bungalow in the southern part of Mysore.  To this pioneer of our civilization—­Mr. Frederick Green, who had begun work in 1843—­I had a letter of introduction, and was most kindly received, and put in the way of acquiring land which I started on and still hold.  To the south, in the adjacent little province of Coorg—­now, as we shall afterwards see, an extensive coffee-field—­the first European plantation had been started the year before, i.e., 1854, while to the north some fifty to seventy miles away the country was, in a European sense, occupied by only three English, or, to be exact, Scotch planters.  In 1856 I started active life as a planter on my own account, about twelve miles away from the estate of Mr. Green, while in the same year two other planters—­Scotchmen by the way—­made their appearance.  The southern part of Mysore was thus occupied by four planters, and we were all about twelve miles from each other.  It is difficult to conceive the state of isolation in which we lived, and as we were all Europeanly speaking single handed, and could seldom leave home, we often had not for weeks together an opportunity of seeing a single white face, and so rare indeed was a visit from a neighbour that, when one was coming to see me, I used to sit on a hill watching for the first glimpse of him, like a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island watching for the glimpse of a sail on the horizon.  As for the Indian mutinies, which broke out the year after I had started work, they might have been going on in Norway as far as we were concerned; none of us at all appreciated the importance and gravity of the events that were occurring, and one of my neighbours said that it was not worth while trying to understand the situation, and that we had better wait for the book that would be sure to come out when things had settled down.  And the native population around us appeared to know as little of the mutinies as we did.  They seemed to be aware that some disturbance was going on somewhere in the north, and that represented the whole extent of their knowledge of the subject.