ith pink flowers.
It is indigenous in Sikkim, and known as _Magnolia
Campbellii_.--Editor.

After breakfast we started to look about us. We were on a strip of dry
land about two hundred yards broad by five hundred long, bordered on one
side by the river, and on the other three by endless desolate swamps,
that stretched as far as the eye could reach. This strip of land was
raised about twenty-five feet above the plain of the surrounding swamps
and the river level: indeed it had every appearance of having been made
by the hand of man.

"This place has been a wharf," said Leo, dogmatically.

"Nonsense," I answered. "Who would be stupid enough to build a wharf
in the middle of these dreadful marshes in a country inhabited by
savages--that is, if it is inhabited at all?"

"Perhaps it was not always marsh, and perhaps the people were not
always savage," he said drily, looking down the steep bank, for we were
standing by the river. "Look there," he went on, pointing to a spot
where the hurricane of the previous night had torn up one of the
magnolia trees by the roots, which had grown on the extreme edge of the
bank just where it sloped down to the water, and lifted a large cake of
earth with them. "Is not that stonework? If not, it is very like it."

"Nonsense," I said again, but we clambered down to the spot, and got
between the upturned roots and the bank.

"Well?" he said.

But I did not answer this time. I only whistled. For there, laid bare by
the removal of the earth, was an undoubted facing of solid stone laid in
large blocks and bound together with brown cement, so hard that I could
make no impression on it with the file in my shooting-knife. Nor was
this all; seeing something projecting through the soil at the bottom of
the bared patch of walling, I removed the loose earth with my hands, and
revealed a huge stone ring, a foot or more in diameter, and about three
inches thick. This fairly staggered me.

"Looks rather like a wharf where good-sized vessels have been moored,
does it not, Uncle Horace?" said Leo, with an excited grin.

I tried to say "Nonsense" again, but the word stuck in my throat--the
ring spoke for itself. In some past age vessels _had_ been moored there,
and this stone wall was undoubtedly the remnant of a solidly constructed
wharf. Probably the city to which it had belonged lay buried beneath the
swamp behind it.

"Begins to look as though there were something in the story after