meets the trunk.  Even in the driest weather, these little natural tanks will, if gashed with a knife, yield nearly a tumblerful of pure sweet water, whence the popular name for the tree.  A certain dull M.P., on his travels, had come down to Barrackpore for Sunday, and inquired eagerly whether there were any Travellers’ Trees either in the park or the gardens there, as he had heard of them, but had never yet seen one.  We assured him that in the cool of the evening we would show him quite a thicket of Travellers’ Trees.  It occurred to the Viceroy’s son and myself that it would be a pity should the globe-trotting M.P.’s expectations not be realised, after the long spell of drought we had had.  So the two of us went off and carefully filled up the natural reservoirs of some six fan-bananas with fresh spring-water till they were brimful.  Suddenly we had a simultaneous inspiration, and returning to the house we fetched two bottles of light claret, which we poured carefully into the natural cisterns of two more trees, which we marked.  Late in the afternoon we conducted the M.P. to the grove of Travellers’ Trees, handed him a glass, and made him gash the stem of one of them with his pen knife.  Thanks to our preparation, it gushed water like one of the Trafalgar Square fountains, and the touring legislator was able to satisfy himself that it was good drinking-water.  He had previously been making some inquiries about so-called “Palm-wine,” which is merely the fermented juice of the toddy-palm.  We told him that some Travellers’ Palms produced this wine, and with a slight exercise of ingenuity we induced him to tap one of the trees we had doctored with claret.  Naturally, a crimson liquid spouted into his glass in response to the thrust of his pen-knife, and after tasting it two or three times, he reluctantly admitted that its flavour was not unlike that of red wine.  It ought to have been, considering that we had poured an entire bottle of good sound claret into that tree.  The ex-M.P. possibly reflects now on the difficulties with which any attempts to introduce “Pussyfoot” legislation into India would be confronted in a land where some trees produce red wine spontaneously.

On another occasion I was going by sea from Calcutta to Ceylon.  On board the steamer there were a number of Americans, principally ladies, connected, I think, with some missionary undertaking.  When we got within about a hundred miles of Ceylon, these American ladies all began repeating to each other the verse of the well-known hymn: 

    “What though the spicy breezes
    Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle,”