The Price Of A Pikul Of White Pepper Is Six Dollars (24s.), Whereas That Of A Pikul Of Black Is Only Three Dollars (12s.).

The greatest height attained by the gambir plant is eight feet.

The leaves alone are used in trade: they are first stripped off the stalk, and then boiled down in large coppers. The thick juice is placed in wide wooden vessels, and dried in the sun; it is then cut into slips three inches long and packed up. Gambir is an article that is very useful in dyeing, and hence is frequently exported to Europe. Pepper plantations are always to be found near a plantation of the gambir plant, as the former are always manured with the boiled leaves of the latter.

Although all the work on the plantations, as well as every other description of labour at Singapore, is performed by free labourers, I was told that it cost less than if it were done by slaves. The wages here are very trifling indeed; a common labourer receives three dollars a month, without either board or lodging; and yet with this, he is enabled not only to subsist himself, but to maintain a family. Their huts, which are composed of foliage, they build themselves; their food consists of small fish, roots, and a few vegetables. Nor is their apparel more expensive; for, beyond the immediate vicinity of the town, and where all the plantations are situated, the children go about entirely naked, while the men wear nothing more than a small apron about a hand's-breadth wide, and fastened between the legs:

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