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-honoured 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
conceive 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 banana patch anywhere in the
neighbourhood, 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 pips.
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 flavourless 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 flavour much like that of
potatoes _à la maítre d'hótel_ 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 Vineland, and how the Mexican empire
had some knowledge of Accadian 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
misdemeanour 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 humour 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 coloured 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 uses 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 modern English 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 fetiches 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 honourables 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.