n oriental population crowds the courtyard and pours out upon
the roadway. Note the grotesque plasticine monsters who guard the
portals, also by G. P. W., who had a free hand with the architecture of
this remarkable specimen of eastern religiosity. They are nothing, you
may be sure, to the gigantic idols inside, out of the reach of the
sacrilegious camera. To the right is a tropical thatched hut. The
thatched roof is really that nice ribbed paper that comes round
bottles--a priceless boon to these games. All that comes into the house
is saved for us. The owner of the hut lounges outside the door. He is a
dismounted cavalry-corps man, and he owns one cow. His fence, I may
note, belonged to a little wooden farm we bought in Switzerland. Its
human inhabitants are scattered; its beasts follow a precarious living
as wild guinea-pigs on the islands to the south.

Your attention is particularly directed to the trees about and behind
the temple, which thicken to a forest on the further island to the
right. These trees we make of twigs taken from trees and bushes in the
garden, and stuck into holes in our boards. Formerly we lived in a
house with a little wood close by, and our forests were wonderful. Now
we are restricted to our garden, and we could get nothing for this set
out but jasmine and pear. Both have wilted a little, and are not nearly
such spirited trees as you can make out of fir trees, for instance. It
is for these woods chiefly that we have our planks perforated with
little holes. No tin trees can ever be so plausible and various and
jolly as these. With a good garden to draw upon one can make terrific
sombre woods, and then lie down and look through them at lonely
horsemen or wandering beasts.

That further island on the right is a less settled country than the
island of the temple. Camels, you note, run wild there; there is a sort
of dwarf elephant, similar to the now extinct kind of which one finds
skeletons in Malta, pigs, a red parrot, and other such creatures, of
lead and wood. The pear-trees are fine. It is those which have
attracted white settlers (I suppose they are), whose thatched huts are
to be seen both upon the beach and in-land. By the huts on the beach
lie a number of pear-tree logs; but a raid of negroid savages from the
to the left is in the only settler is the man in a adjacent island
progress, and clearly visible rifleman's uniform running inland for
help. Beyond, peeping out among the trees, a