o hilly is the little island that if
the engine is approaching the chances are it looks as if it were about to
plunge wildly down on its head and turn a somersault into the station, or
else it seems to be gradually climbing up a steep gradient after the
fashion of a fly on the wall. But everything appears well managed, and the
dulness of the daily press is never enlivened by accounts of a railway
accident.

For two or three miles out of Port Louis the country is still flat and
marshy, and ugly to the last degree--not the ugliness of bareness and trim
neatness, but overgrown, dank and mournful, for all its teeming life. By
the roadside stand, here and there, what once were handsome and hospitable
mansions, but are now abodes of desolation and decay. The same sad story
may be told of each--how their owners, well-born descendants of old French
families, flourished there, amid their beautiful flowers, in health and
happiness for many a long day until the fatal "fever year" of 1867, when
half the families were carried off by swift death, and the survivors
wellnigh ruined by hurricanes and disasters of all sorts. Poor little
Mauritius has certainly passed through some very hard times, but she has
borne them bravely and pluckily, and is now reaping her reward in
returning prosperity. Sharp as has been the lesson, it is something for
her inhabitants to have learned to enforce better sanitary laws, and there
is little fear now but that their eyes have been opened to the importance
of health regulations.

One effect of the epidemic which desolated Port Louis has been the
creation of the prettiest imaginable suburbs or settlements within eight
or ten miles of the town. These districts have the quaintest French
names--Beau Bassin, Curepipe, Pamplemousse, Flacq, Moka, and so forth,
with the English name of "Racehill" standing out among them in cockney
simplicity. My particular suburb is the nearest and most convenient from
which F---- can compass his daily official duties, but I am not entitled
to boast of an elevation of more than eight hundred feet. Still, there is
an extraordinary difference in the temperature before we have climbed to
even half that height, and we turn out of a green lane bordered by thick
hedges of something exactly like English hawthorn into a wind-swept
clearing on the borders of a deep ravine where stands a bungalow-looking
dwelling rejoicing in the name of "The Oaks." It might much more
appropriately have