By this time my wife is up, and she goes into the flower-garden, and I into the kitchen-garden, to sow seeds and superintend the gardeners. And here is the most curious scene; seven black men at work, their only dress a cloth round the loins, their long black hair wound up in a knot at the back of the head, their only tools a sort of broad pickaxe with a very short handle and a small sickle, these are their only gardening implements; and two men are watering with gurrahs, a sort of narrow-necked jar made of black clay, which they let down into a well by a rope. In the flower-garden are the beautiful balsams, of many colours, and as large as gooseberry-bushes; the splendid coxcombs, eight or ten feet high, whose great thick flowers measure twelve or fourteen inches by six or eight; the varieties of the hybiscas, with many others; and a few of the more precious European rarities--at least to us--such as the heliotrope, verbenum, larkspur, and many others. Our borders are mostly of the sweet-scented grass from the Neilghur hills, which is always covered with a beautiful small white flower. In the vegetable-garden, besides the precious peas, beans, celery, cress, &c., which will only grow at this time of the year, are the pine-apple, the plantain, the guava, the lime, the orange, the custard-apple, with many other native plants and trees; and in the hedges are some of the beautiful palms, from the sap of which the Indians make an intoxicating drink called toddy. In the compound are some very fine mango-trees and beeches. The other evening I was sitting alone writing at about eleven o'clock, when I heard the sentry call out loudly to my servants who were sleeping in the verandah. I jumped up to see what was the matter. "A leopard-tiger!" was the answer; and the man said he had seen a leopard creeping stealthily along the compound. He leapt over the wall into the garden of the Colonel who lives in the next house, and the following day footsteps were found in various parts of the cantonment, which the natives said were too large for a leopard, and must have been the marks of a regular tiger. I did not see the animal myself; but if the men were correct, it must have been an extraordinary occurrence, as our little island is entirely free from wild beasts; and although it is at this time of the year joined to the main by a narrow neck of sand, yet no large beast will cross unless pressed either by hunger or by hunters.