When I had sojourned in this cold climate about half a year, I found the same people enjoying a delicious temperature and a country full of beauty and verdure. The trees and shrubs were furnished with a great variety of fruits. These, with other vegetable products, made up a large part of the food of the inhabitants. I particularly relished certain berries growing in bunches, some white and some red, of a very pleasant sourish taste, and so transparent that one might have seen the seeds at their very centre. Here were whole fields full of extremely sweet-smelling flowers, that they told me were succeeded by pods bearing seeds that afforded good nourishment to man and beast. A great variety of birds enlivened the groves and woods. Among these I was highly entertained by one, that, with little teaching, spoke as plainly as a parrot.

The people were tolerably gentle and civilized, and possessed many of the arts of life.

in warm weather was very various.

Their dress Many were

clad only in a thin cloth made of the long fibres

of the stalk of a plant cultivated for the purpose: this they prepared by soaking in water, and then beating with large mallets. Others wore cloth woven from a sort of vegetable wool growing in pods upon bushes. But the most singular material was a fine glossy stuff, used chiefly by the richer classes, which, as I was credibly informed, is manufactured out of the webs of a certain kind of grub worm. This is a most wonderful circumstance, if we consider the immense number necessary to the production of so large a quantity of the stuff as I saw used.

This people are very peculiar in their dress, especially the women. Their clothing consists of a great number of articles impossible to be described, and strangely disguising the natural form of the body. In some instances they seem very cleanly; but in others the Hottentots can scarcely go beyond them. Their mode of dressing the hair is

remarkable: it is all matted and stiffened with the fat of swine and other animals, mixed up with powders of various kinds and colours. Like many Indian nations, they use feathers in the headdress. One thing surprised me much bring up in their houses an animal of the tiger kind, with formidable teeth and claws, that is played with and caressed by the tiniest and most timid of their children !"

they

"I am sure I would not play with it," said Jack. "Why, you might chance to get an ugly scratch if you did," said the Captain.

"The language of this people seems very harsh and unintelligible to a foreigner; yet they talk to one another with great ease and quickness. One of the oddest customs is that which men use on saluting each other. Let the weather be what it will, they uncover their heads, and remain uncovered for some time, if they mean to be extremely respectful.

'Why, that is like pulling off our hats," said Jack.

Ah, ha, papa!" cried Betsy, "I have found you out! You have been telling us of our own country, and what is done at home, all this while!"

"But," said Jack, "we don't burn stones, nor eat grease and powdered seeds, nor wear skins and webs, nor play with tigers."

"No?" said the Captain; "pray what are coals but stones; and is not butter grease; and corn, seeds; and leather, skins; and silk the web of a kind of caterpillar; and may we not as well call a cat an animal of the tiger kind, as a tiger an animal of the cat kind?"

BARBAULD.

[Matty making tea. Dick, Lubin, and Nelly round the table.]

Lubin. One more spoonful, Matty; don't grudge the tea; you know that I like it very strong.

Matty. How fast the tea goes, to be sure! It is not a fortnight since I filled the caddy quite full.

Nelly. I sometimes think how curious it would be if we could count up all the pounds of tea that are used in England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the course of a single day. I daresay that if it were all piled up it would make a heap as big as —as a hay-stack.

Lubin. Oh, that is rather too much of a good thing, Nelly! You forget that every one measures out tea by tiny spoonfuls, and what a number it would take to make up the size of a hay-stack.

Dick. Don't laugh at Nelly, Master Lubin, till you are sure that she has not the right on her side. I happen to have been reading lately a good deal upon the subject. Tea comes from China in chests; each chest is about twenty-one inches high, and holds about ninety-six pounds of tea.

Now, about two thousand four hundred and sixty-six chests of tea are used every day in the British Islands, and if they were all emptied out on the ground, I think that they would go some way towards building up a pretty high stack of tea.

Lubin. You don't mean to tell me that we drink up all that tea in one day!

Dick. You must remember that there are millions of tea-pots to be filled.

Matty. It puzzles my head to understand numbers. When one gets above a hundred, it seems all the same to me whether one talks of thousands or millions.

Lubin. That is just the way with me. I know how big a hay-stack looks, but I have not the