relative of the family. About noon the father came back with a load of wood. He was a man of the world, and knew all about the performance. After he had looked at the sketch, the children, and finally the mother, all came round my stool and had a good long look at my work. Even so the mother would not let the children dab their toes into my paints, or generally become a nuisance. For this unexpected manifestation of a sense of the fitness of things, I felt grateful to her, and, before I went away, found a way of recompensing the children for the sorrow they must have felt at being compelled to relinquish such a rare opportunity for getting into mischief. Every morning I found some quaint figure with which to enrich my sketch-book--a sarong-weaver, or a beggar crouching by the wayside, or a Hadji, with his large umbrella and green turban, the latter marking the fact of his having accomplished a pilgrimage to Mecca. But, interesting as were these human studies, my pleasantest recollections of Buitenzorg centre in the visit which I paid to the Botanical Gardens, under the guidance of the curator, Dr. Treub. My account of this, however, and of the gardens generally, I reserve for the next chapter. [Illustration: NATIVES SQUATTING.] CHAPTER VII. THE BOTANICAL GARDENS. History of the Buitenzorg gardens--Teysmann-- Scheffer--Three separate branches--Horticultural garden--Mountain garden--Botanical garden-- Dr. Treub--Lady Raffles' monument--Pandanus with aërial roots--Cyrtostachys renda--Stelecho-karpus-- Urostigma--Brazilian palms--Laboratories and offices--Number of men employed--Scientific strangers. Among the twenty or thirty tropical gardens established in the colonial possessions of the various European Powers, three stand pre-eminent--those of Calcutta, the Peradenia Gardens in Ceylon, and the Dutch gardens at Buitenzorg. It is only natural that a people so distinguished for horticulture as the Dutch should have turned to account the floral wealth of the Malay Archipelago, perhaps the richest botanical hunting-ground in the world. The Buitenzorg gardens, however, owe their present celebrity more to individual energy than to Government patronage.