The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is
modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona,
and other time-honored plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant
to give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals,
as well as to rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid
reader, who may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English,
or for the name of a distinguished Norman family. In anticipation
of the possible objection that the word “Banana” is not strictly
classical, I would humbly urge the precept and example of my old friend
Horace—enemy I once thought him—who expresses his approbation of those
happy innovations whereby Latium was gradually enriched with a copious
vocabulary. I maintain that if Banana, bananæ, &c., is not already a
Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it
shall be in future. Linnæus indeed thought otherwise. He too assigned
the plant and fruit to the first declension, but handed it over to
none other than our earliest acquaintance in the Latin language,
Musa. He called the banana _Musa sapientum_. What connection he could
possibly perceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the
ægis-bearing Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to
eat a particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff,
passes my humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally
noticed their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana,
and wise men shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the
other.
Let it not for a moment be supposed, however, that I wish to treat
the useful and ornamental banana with intentional disrespect. On the
contrary, I cherish for it—at a distance—feelings of the highest
esteem and admiration. We are so parochial in our views, taking us
as a species, that I dare say very few English people really know
how immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most of us
it envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit, largely
imported at Covent Garden, and a capital thing to stick on one of the
tall dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party, because it looks
delightfully foreign, and just serves to balance the pine-apple at
the opposite end of the hospitable mahogany. Perhaps such innocent
readers will be surprised to learn that bananas and plantains supply
the principal food-stuff of a far larger fraction of the human race
than that which is supported by wheaten bread. They form the veritable
staff of life to the inhabitants of both eastern and western tropics.
What the potato is to the degenerate descendant of Celtic kings; what
the oat is to the kilted Highlandman; what rice is to the Bengalee,
and Indian corn to the American negro, that is the muse of sages (I
translate literally from the immortal Swede) to African savages and
Brazilian slaves. Humboldt calculated that an acre of bananas would
supply a greater quantity of solid food to hungry humanity than could
possibly be extracted from the same extent of cultivated ground by any
other known plant. So you see the question is no small one: to sing the
praise of this Linnæan muse is a task well worthy of the Pierian muses.
Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana plant? If not,
then you have never voyaged to those delusive tropics. Tropical
vegetation, as ordinarily understood by poets and painters, consists
entirely of the coco-nut palm and the banana bush. Do you wish to
paint a beautiful picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island _à
la_ Tennyson—a summer-isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of
sea?—then you introduce a group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous
heights of even, in the very foreground of your pretty sketch, just to
let your public understand at a glance that these are the delicious
poetical tropics. Do you desire to create an ideal paradise, _à la_
Bernardin de St. Pierre, where idyllic Virginies die of pure modesty
rather than appear before the eyes of their beloved but unwedded Pauls
in a lace-bedraped _peignoir_?—then you strike the keynote by sticking
in the middle distance a hut or cottage, overshadowed by the broad
and graceful foliage of the picturesque banana. (“Hut” is a poor and
chilly word for these glowing descriptions, far inferior to the pretty
and high-sounding original _chaumière_.) That is how we do the tropics
when we want to work upon the emotions of the reader. But it is all
a delicate theatrical illusion; a trick of art meant to deceive and
impose upon the unwary who have never been there, and would like to
think it all genuine. In reality, nine times out of ten, you might cast
your eyes casually around you in any tropical valley, and if there
didn’t happen to be a native cottage with a coco-nut grove and a banana
patch anywhere in the neighborhood, you would see nothing in the way of
vegetation which you mightn’t see at home any day in Europe. But what
painter would ever venture to paint the tropics without the palm trees?
He might just as well try to paint the desert without the camels, or to
represent St. Sebastian without a sheaf of arrows sticking unperceived
in the calm centre of his unruffled bosom, to mark and emphasise his
Sebastianic personality.
Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with its
practically almost identical relation, the plantain, is a real bit of
tropical foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice against the tropics
generally, but I allow the sunsets, the coco-nuts, and the bananas.
The true stem creeps underground, and sends up each year an upright
branch, thickly covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat
like those of the canna cultivated in our gardens as “Indian shot,”
but far larger, nobler, and handsomer. They sometimes measure from
six to ten feet in length, and their thick midrib and strongly marked
diverging veins give them a very lordly and graceful appearance. But
they are apt in practice to suffer much from the fury of the tropical
storms. The wind rips the leaves up between the veins as far as the
midrib in tangled tatters; so that after a good hurricane they look
more like coco-nut palm leaves than like single broad masses of
foliage as they ought properly to do. This, of course, is the effect
of a gentle and balmy hurricane—a mere capful of wind that tears and
tatters them. After a really bad storm (one of the sort when you
tie ropes round your wooden house to prevent its falling bodily to
pieces, I mean) the bananas are all actually blown down, and the crop
for that season utterly destroyed. The apparent stem, being merely
composed of the overlapping and sheathing leaf-stalks, has naturally
very little stability; and the soft succulent trunk accordingly gives
way forthwith at the slightest onslaught. This liability to be blown
down in high winds forms the weak point of the plantain, viewed as
a food-stuff crop. In the South Sea Islands, where there is little
shelter, the poor Fijian, in cannibal days, often lost his one means of
subsistence from this cause, and was compelled to satisfy the pangs of
hunger on the plump persons of his immediate relatives. But since the
introduction of Christianity, and of a dwarf stout wind-proof variety
of banana, his condition in this respect, I am glad to say, has been
greatly ameliorated.
By descent, the banana bush is a developed tropical lily, not at all
remotely allied to the common iris, only that its flowers and fruit are
clustered together on a hanging spike, instead of growing solitary and
separate as in the true irises. The blossoms, which, though pretty,
are comparatively inconspicuous for the size of the plant, show the
extraordinary persistence of the lily type; for almost all the vast
number of species, more or less directly descended from the primitive
lily, continue to the very end of the chapter to have six petals, six
stamens, and three rows of seeds in their fruits or capsules. But
practical man, with his eye always steadily fixed on the one important
quality of edibility—the sum and substance to most people of all
botanical research—has confined his attention almost entirely to the
fruit of the banana. In all essentials (other than the systematically
unimportant one just alluded to) the banana fruit in its original state
exactly resembles the capsule of the iris—that pretty pod that divides
in three when ripe, and shows the delicate orange-coated seeds lying in
triple rows within—only, in the banana, the fruit does not open; in the
sweet language of technical botany, it is an indehiscent capsule; and
the seeds, instead of standing separate and distinct, as in the iris,
are embedded in a soft and pulpy substance which forms the edible and
practical part of the entire arrangement.
This is the proper appearance of the original and natural banana,
before it has been taken in hand and cultivated by tropical man.
When cut across the middle, it ought to show three rows of seeds,
interspersed with pulp, and faintly preserving some dim memory of
the dividing wall which once separated them. In practice, however,
the banana differs widely from this theoretical ideal, as practice
often _will_ differ from theory; for it has been so long cultivated
and selected by man—being probably one of the very oldest, if not
actually quite the oldest, of domesticated plants—that it has all but
lost the original habit of producing seeds. This is a common effect
of cultivation on fruits, and it is of course deliberately aimed at
by horticulturists, as the seeds are generally a nuisance, regarded
from the point of view of the eater, and their absence improves the
fruit, as long as one can manage to get along somehow without them.
In the pretty little Tangierine oranges (so ingeniously corrupted by
fruiterers into mandarins), the seeds have almost been cultivated out;
in the best pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried
state as currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties
of pears they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and
useless pippins. But the banana, more than any other plant we know of,
has managed for many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The
cultivated sort, especially in America, is quite seedless, and the
plants are propagated entirely by suckers.
Still, you can never wholly circumvent nature. Expel her with a
pitchfork, _tamen usque recurrit_. Now nature has settled that the
right way to propagate plants is by means of seedlings. Strictly
speaking, indeed, it is the only way; the other modes of growth from
bulbs or cuttings are not really propagation, but mere reduplication
by splitting, as when you chop a worm in two, and a couple of worms
wriggle off contentedly forthwith in either direction. Just so when
you divide a plant by cuttings, suckers, slips, or runners: the two
apparent plants thus produced are in the last resort only separate
parts of the same individual—one and indivisible, like the French
Republic. Seedlings are absolutely distinct individuals; they are the
product of the pollen of one plant and the ovules of another, and they
start afresh in life with some chance of being fairly free from the
hereditary taints or personal failings of either parent. But cuttings
or suckers are only the same old plant over and over again in fresh
circumstances, transplanted as it were, but not truly renovated or
rejuvenescent. That is the real reason why our potatoes are now all
going to—well, the same place as the army has been going ever since the
earliest memories of the oldest officer in the whole service. We have
gone on growing potatoes over and over again from the tubers alone, and
hardly ever from seed, till the whole constitution of the potato kind
has become permanently enfeebled by old age and dotage. The eyes (as
farmers call them) are only buds or underground branches; and to plant
potatoes as we usually do is nothing more than to multiply the apparent
scions by fission. Odd as it may sound to say so, all the potato vines
in a whole field are often, from the strict biological point of view,
parts of a single much-divided individual. It is just as though one
were to go on cutting up a single worm, time after time, as soon as
he grew again, till at last the one original creature had multiplied
into a whole colony of apparently distinct individuals. Yet, if the
first worm happened to have the gout or the rheumatism (metaphorically
speaking), all the other worms into which his compound personality had
been divided would doubtless suffer from the same complaints throughout
the whole of their joint lifetimes.
The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable tendency to
degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated.
Potatoes have only been in cultivation for a few hundred years; and yet
the potato constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of
growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy prey to potato
fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand other persistent enemies.
It is just the same with the vine—propagated too long by layers or
cuttings, its health has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist
the ravages of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease
fungus. But the banana, though of very ancient and positively
immemorial antiquity as a cultivated plant, seems somehow gifted with
an extraordinary power of holding its own in spite of long-continued
unnatural propagation. For thousands of years it has been grown in Asia
in the seedless condition, and yet it springs as heartily as ever
still from the underground suckers. Nevertheless, there must in the
end be some natural limit to this wonderful power of reproduction, or
rather of longevity; for, in the strictest sense, the banana bushes
that now grow in the negro gardens of Trinidad and Demerara are part
and parcel of the very same plants which grew and bore fruit a thousand
years ago in the native compounds of the Malay Archipelago.
In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the banana is
the very oldest product of human tillage. Man, we must remember, is
essentially by origin a tropical animal, and wild tropical fruits must
necessarily have formed his earliest food-stuffs. It was among them
of course that his first experiments in primitive agriculture would
be tried; the little insignificant seeds and berries of cold northern
regions would only very slowly be added to his limited stock in
husbandry, as circumstances pushed some few outlying colonies northward
and ever northward toward the chillier unoccupied regions. Now, of
all tropical fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays
cultivation. It has been calculated that the same area which will
produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes
will produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas. The cultivation
of the various varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago
dates, says De Candolle, “from an epoch impossible to realise.” Its
diffusion, as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go
back to a period “contemporary with or even anterior to that of the
human races.” What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at
a loss to comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana
was originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely
intends to say that before men began to separate they sent special
messengers on in front of them to diffuse the banana in the different
countries they were about to visit. Even legend retains some trace of
the extreme antiquity of the species as a cultivated fruit, for Adam
and Eve are said to have reclined under the shadow of its branches,
whence Linnæus gave to the sort known as the plantain the Latin name
of _Musa paradisiaca_. If a plant was cultivated in Eden by the grand
old gardener and his wife, as Lord Tennyson democratically styled them
(before his elevation to the peerage), we may fairly conclude that it
possesses a very respectable antiquity indeed.
The wild banana is a native of the Malay region, according to De
Candolle, who has produced by far the most learned and unreadable
work on the origin of domestic plants ever yet written. (Please don’t
give me undue credit for having heroically read it through out of
pure love of science: I was one of its unfortunate reviewers.) The
wild form produces seed, and grows in Cochin China, the Philippines,
Ceylon, and Khasia. Like most other large tropical fruits, it no doubt
owes its original development to the selective action of monkeys,
hornbills, parrots, and other big fruit-eaters; and it shares with
all fruits of similar origin one curious tropical peculiarity. Most
northern berries, like the strawberry, the raspberry, the currant, and
the blackberry, developed by the selective action of small northern
birds, can be popped at once into the mouth and eaten whole; they
have no tough outer rind or defensive covering of any sort. But big
tropical fruits, which lay themselves out for the service of large
birds or monkeys, have always hard outer coats, because they could
only be injured by smaller animals, who would eat the pulp without
helping in the dispersion of the useful seeds, the one object really
held in view by the mother plant. Often, as in the case of the orange,
the rind even contains a bitter, nauseous, or pungent juice, while
at times, as in the pine-apple, the prickly pear, the sweet-sop, and
the cherimoyer, the entire fruit is covered with sharp projections,
stinging hairs, or knobby protuberances, on purpose to warn off the
unauthorised depredator. It was this line of defence that gave the
banana in the first instance its thick yellow skin; and looking at the
matter from the epicure’s point of view, one may say roughly that all
tropical fruits have to be skinned before they can be eaten. They are
all adapted for being cut up with a knife and fork, or dug out with
a spoon, on a civilised dessert-plate. As for that most delicious of
Indian fruits, the mango, it has been well said that the only proper
way to eat it is over a tub of water, with a couple of towels hanging
gracefully across the side.
The varieties of the banana are infinite in number, and, as in most
other plants of ancient cultivation, they shade off into one another by
infinitesimal gradations. Two principal sorts, however, are commonly
recognised—the true banana of commerce, and the common plantain. The
banana proper is eaten raw, as a fruit, and is allowed accordingly to
ripen thoroughly before being picked for market; the plantain, which is
the true food-stuff of all the equatorial region in both hemispheres,
is gathered green and roasted as a vegetable, or, to use the more
expressive West Indian negro phrase, as a bread-kind. Millions of human
beings in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean
live almost entirely on the mild and succulent but tasteless plantain.
Some people like the fruit; to me personally it is more suggestive of
a very flavorless over-ripe pear than of anything else in heaven or
earth or the waters that are under the earth—the latter being the most
probable place to look for it, as its taste and substance are decidedly
watery. Baked dry in the green state “it resembles roasted chestnuts,”
or rather baked parsnip; pulped and boiled with water it makes “a very
agreeable sweet soup,” almost as nice as peasoup with brown sugar in
it; and cut into slices, sweetened, and fried, it forms “an excellent
substitute for fruit pudding,” having a flavor much like that of
potatoes _à la maître d’hôtel_ served up in treacle.
Altogether a fruit to be sedulously avoided, the plantain, though
millions of our spiritually destitute African brethren haven’t yet for
a moment discovered that it isn’t every bit as good as wheaten bread
and fresh butter. Missionary enterprise will no doubt before long
enlighten them on this subject, and create a good market in time for
American flour and Manchester piece-goods.
Though by origin a Malayan plant, there can be little doubt that the
banana had already reached the mainland of America and the West India
Islands long before the voyage of Columbus. When Pizarro disembarked
upon the coast of Peru on his desolating expedition, the mild-eyed,
melancholy, doomed Peruvians flocked down to the shore and offered him
bananas in a lordly dish. Beds composed of banana leaves have been
discovered in the tombs of the Incas, of date anterior, of course,
to the Spanish conquest. How did they get there? Well, it is clearly
an absurd mistake to suppose that Columbus discovered America; as
Artemus Ward pertinently remarked, the noble Red Indian had obviously
discovered it long before him. There had been intercourse of old,
too, between Asia and the Western Continent; the elephant-headed god
of Mexico, the debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion,
the singular coincidences between India and Peru, all seem to show
that a stream of communication, however faint, once existed between
the Asiatic and American worlds. Garcilaso himself, the half-Indian
historian of Peru, says that the banana was well known in his native
country before the conquest, and that the Indians say “its origin is
Ethiopia.” In some strange way or other, then, long before Columbus
set foot upon the low sandbank of Cat’s Island, the banana had been
transported from Africa or India to the Western hemisphere.
If it were a plant propagated by seed, one would suppose that it
was carried across by wind or waves, wafted on the feet of birds,
or accidentally introduced in the crannies of drift timber. So the
coco-nut made the tour of the world ages before either of the famous
Cooks—the Captain or the excursion agent—had rendered the same feat
easy and practicable; and so, too, a number of American plants have
fixed their home in the tarns of the Hebrides or among the lonely
bogs of Western Galway. But the banana must have been carried by man,
because it is unknown in the wild state in the Western Continent;
and, as it is practically seedless, it can only have been transported
entire, in the form of a root or sucker. An exactly similar proof of
ancient intercourse between the two worlds is afforded us by the sweet
potato, a plant of undoubted American origin, which was nevertheless
naturalised in China as early as the first centuries of the Christian
era. Now that we all know how the Scandinavians of the eleventh century
went to Massachusetts, which they called Vine-land, and how the
Mexican empire had some knowledge of Acadian astronomy, people are
beginning to discover that Columbus himself was after all an egregious
humbug.
In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the plantain goes
back, no doubt, to a most immemorial antiquity. Our Aryan ancestor
himself, Professor Max Müller’s especial _protégé_, had already
invented several names for it, which duly survive in very classical
Sanskrit. The Greeks of Alexander’s expedition saw it in India, where
“sages reposed beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the
botanical name, _Musa sapientum_.” As the sages in question were lazy
Brahmans, always celebrated for their immense capacity for doing
nothing, the report, as quoted by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one.
But the accepted derivation of the word _Musa_ from an Arabic original
seems to me highly uncertain; for Linnæus, who first bestowed it on
the genus, called several other allied genera by such cognate names as
Urania and Heliconia. If, therefore, the father of botany knew that his
own word was originally Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime
and misdemeanor of deliberate punning. Should the Royal Society get
wind of this, something serious would doubtless happen; for it is well
known that the possession of a sense of humor is absolutely fatal to
the pretensions of a man of science.
Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana serves
incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from the stem,
and employed for weaving into textile fabrics and making paper.
Several kinds of the plantain tribe are cultivated for this purpose
exclusively, the best known among them being the so-called manilla
hemp, a plant largely grown in the Philippine Islands. Many of the
finest Indian shawls are woven from banana stems, and much of the
rope that we use in our houses comes from the same singular origin. I
know nothing more strikingly illustrative of the extreme complexity
of our modern civilisation than the way in which we thus every day
employ articles of exotic manufacture in our ordinary life without
ever for a moment suspecting or inquiring into their true nature.
What lady knows when she puts on her delicate wrapper, from Liberty’s
or from Swan and Edgar’s, that the material from which it is woven
is a Malayan plantain stalk? Who ever thinks that the glycerine for
our chapped hands comes from Travancore coco-nuts, and that the pure
butter supplied us from the farm in the country is colored yellow with
Jamaican annatto? We break a tooth, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed
out, because the grape-curers of Zante are not careful enough about
excluding small stones from their stock of currants; and we suffer
from indigestion because the Cape wine-grower has doctored his light
Burgundies with Brazilian logwood and white rum, to make them taste
like Portuguese port. Take merely this very question of dessert, and
how intensely complicated it really is. The West Indian bananas keep
company with sweet St. Michaels from the Azores, and with Spanish
cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits from Metz, figs from Smyrna, and
dates from Tunis lie side by side on our table with Brazil nuts and
guava jelly and damson cheese and almonds and raisins. We forget where
everything comes from nowadays, in our general consciousness that they
all come from the Queen Victoria Street Stores, and any real knowledge
of common objects is rendered every day more and more impossible by
the bewildering complexity and variety, every day increasing, of the
common objects themselves, their substitutes, adulterates, and spurious
imitations. Why, you probably never heard of manilla hemp before,
until this very minute, and yet you have been familiarly using it all
your lifetime, while 400,000 hundredweights of that useful article are
annually imported into this country alone. It is an interesting study
to take any day a list of market quotations, and ask oneself about
every material quoted, what it is and what they do with it.
For example, can you honestly pretend that you really understand the
use and importance of that valuable object of everyday demand, fustic?
I remember an ill-used telegraph clerk in a tropical colony once
complaining to me that English cable operators were so disgracefully
ignorant about this important staple as invariably to substitute for
its name the word “justice” in all telegrams which originally referred
to it. Have you any clear and definite notions as to the prime origin
and final destination of a thing called jute, in whose sole manufacture
the whole great and flourishing town of Dundee lives and moves and
has its being? What is turmeric? Whence do we obtain vanilla? How
many commercial products are yielded by the orchids? How many totally
distinct plants in different countries afford the totally distinct
starches lumped together in grocers’ lists under the absurd name of
arrowroot? When you ask for sago do you really see that you get it?
and how many entirely different objects described as sago are known
to commerce? Define the use of partridge canes and cohune oil. What
objects are generally manufactured from tucum? Would it surprise you
to learn that English door-handles are commonly made out of coquilla
nuts? that your wife’s buttons are turned from the indurated fruit of
the Tagua palm? and that the knobs of umbrellas grew originally in the
remote depths of Guatemalan forests? Are you aware that a plant called
manioc supplies the starchy food of about one-half the population of
tropical America? These are the sort of inquiries with which a new
edition of “Mangnall’s Questions” would have to be filled; and as to
answering them—why, even the pupil-teachers in a London Board School
(who represent, I suppose, the highest attainable level of human
knowledge) would often find themselves completely nonplussed. The fact
is, tropical trade has opened out so rapidly and so wonderfully that
nobody knows much about the chief articles of tropical growth; we go
on using them in an uninquiring spirit of childlike faith, much as the
Jamaica negroes go on using articles of European manufacture about
whose origin they are so ridiculously ignorant that one young woman
once asked me whether it was really true that cotton handkerchiefs were
dug up out of the ground over in England. Some dim confusion between
coal or iron and Manchester piece-goods seemed to have taken firm
possession of her infantile imagination.
That is why I have thought that a treatise De Banana might
not, perhaps, be wholly without its usefulness to the English
magazine-reading world. After all, a food-stuff which supports hundreds
of millions among our beloved tropical fellow-creatures ought to be
very dear to the heart of a nation which governs (and annually kills)
more black people, taken in the mass, than all the other European
powers put together. We have introduced the blessings of British
rule—the good and well-paid missionary, the Remington rifle, the
red-cotton pocket-handkerchief, and the use of “the liquor called
rum”—into so many remote corners of the tropical world that it is high
time we should begin in return to learn somewhat about fetishes and
fustic, Jamaica and jaggery, bananas and Buddhism. We know too little
still about our colonies and dependencies. “Cape Breton an island!”
cried King George’s Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, in the well-known
story, “Cape Breton an island! Why, so it is! God bless my soul! I must
go and tell the King that Cape Breton’s an island.” That was a hundred
years ago; but only the other day the Board of Trade placarded all
our towns and villages with a flaming notice to the effect that the
Colorado beetle had made its appearance at “a town in Canada called
Ontario,” and might soon be expected to arrive at Liverpool by Cunard
steamer. The right honorables and other high mightinesses who put
forth the notice in question were evidently unaware that Ontario is a
province as big as England, including in its borders Toronto, Ottawa,
Kingston, London, Hamilton, and other large and flourishing towns.
Apparently, in spite of competitive examinations, the schoolmaster is
still abroad in the Government offices.—_Cornhill Magazine._