us pleasantly, accepted our apologies for troubling him, and offered to show us over the grounds.  He was far less courtly in manners than the Chinese coffee-cultivator, to whom we should scarcely have ventured to offer a fee, while out of the Malay’s cunning eyes there gleamed the evident expectation of a snug bonus of silver rupees, which he received as a matter of course when we bade him adieu, and having counted them over and jingled them for a moment in his fingers, he thrust them into his pouch as he re-entered the house.

We found the areca trees planted in rows, and growing to the height of some forty feet, with straight, branchless trunks, terminated at the top with ten or twelve pinnated leaves, each of which is full five feet long.  The fruit grows in clusters immediately below the tuft of leaves.  The outer shell is of a bright golden hue, that gradually deepens to crimson as the fruit matures, and when opened shows a brown, astringent nut about the size of a nutmeg.  This is the portion chewed with chunam and tobacco all over the East; and its use is so universal that one seldom meets a man, woman or child of any Oriental nation whose mouth is not filled, always and everywhere, with the execrable mixture.  Pepper leaves are sprinkled with chunam (lime) and rolled up:  a slice of betel-nut with a quid of tobacco is placed in the mouth first, and then the rolled-up leaf is bitten off, and all masticated together.  When a visitor calls the betel-box is immediately passed to him; and as in regard to the eating of salt in Western Asia, so, in the eastern and southern portions, those who have once partaken of betel-nut together are ever after sworn to faithful and undying friendship.  The use of the areca-nut preserves the teeth from decay, but keeps them stained of a disgusting brick-red color.

On the outer edge of Cassim’s plantation, where the soil was damp, we noticed several long rows of the nepah palm, generally known as attap, and extensively used for thatching houses in the East.  It has the same huge pinnated leaves as most of the other palms, but is destitute of the long straight trunk, the leaves commencing from near the root, and the entire height being seldom more than twelve or fourteen feet.  We saw also a few specimens of the hutan, a strange-looking palmate shrub with leaves fifteen feet long, which are generally used by the Malays for sails, in lieu of canvas, for their piratical proas.  But the strangest of all the palms we saw was the talipat, so called from the Bali word talipoin, a priest; and the name was originally derived from the fact that the sacred fans used by Booddhist priests in their religious ceremonies are formed of its leaves.  This fan is a prescribed item of clerical costume, and no conscientious Booddhist priest ever appears without this long-handled fan held directly in front of his face, to prevent the sacred countenance from coming in contact with anything unclean.  The