There Is A Sanitarium There With A Glorious View, And A Delicious Temperature Ranging From 60 Degrees To 75 Degrees, While In The Town And On The Low Lands It Ranges From 80 Degrees To 90 Degrees.

A sea breeze blows every day, and rain falls throughout the year, except in January and February.

The vegetation is profuse, but less beautiful and tropical than on the mainland, and I have seen very few flowers except in gardens.

The products are manifold - guavas, mangoes, lemons, oranges, bananas, plantains, shaddocks, bread-fruit, etc.; and sugar, rice, sweet potatoes, ginger, areca, and cocoa-nuts, coffee, cloves, some nutmegs, and black and white pepper. My gharrie driver took me to see a Chinese pepper plantation - to me the most interesting thing that I saw on a very long and hot drive. Pepper is a very profitable crop. The vine begins to bear in three or four years after the cuttings have been planted, and yields two crops annually for about thirteen years. It is an East Indian plant, rather pretty, but of rambling and untidy growth, a climber, with smooth, soft stems, ten or twelve feet long, and tough, broadly ovate leaves. It is supported much as hops are. When the berries on a spike begin to turn red they are gathered, as they lose pungency if they are allowed to ripen. They are placed on mats, and are either trodden with the feet or rubbed by the hands to separate them from the spike, after which they are cleaned by winnowing. Black pepper consists of such berries wrinkled and blackened in the process of drying, and white pepper of similar berries freed from the skin and the fleshy part of the fruit by being soaked in water and then rubbed. Some planters bleach with chlorine to improve the appearance; but this process, as may be supposed, does not improve the flavor.

In these climates the natives use enormous quantities of pepper, as they do of all hot condiments, and the Europeans imitate them.

Although there are so many plantations, a great part of Pinang is uncleared, and from the peak most of it looks like a forest. It contains ninety thousand inhabitants, the Chinese more than equaling all the other nationalities put together. Its trade, which in 1860 was valued at 3,500,000 pounds, is now (1880) close upon 8,000,000 pounds, Pinang being, like Singapore, a great entrepot and "distributing point."

Now for the wilds once more!

I. L. B.

A CHAPTER ON PERAK

The Boundaries and Rivers of Perak - Tin Mining - Fruits and Vegetables - The Gomuti Palm - The Trade of Perak - A Future of Coffee - A Hopeful Lookout - Chinese Difficulties - Chinese Disturbances in Larut - The "Pangkor Treaty" - A "Little War" - The Settlement of Perak - The Resident and Assistant-Resident

The "protected" State of Perak (pronounced Payrah) is the richest and most important of the States of the Peninsula, as well as one of the largest. Its coast-line, broken into, however, by a bit of British territory, is about one hundred and twenty-five miles in length.

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