The view from the bridge in the very High Street of Buitenzorg was the richest scene I ever saw. A rushing river running deep down between high banks, covered with a tangle of huge bamboos, palms, tree-ferns, bread-fruit, bananas, and papaw trees, matted together with creepers, every individual plant seeming finer and fresher than other specimens of the same sort, and the larger such plants were, the grander their curves. Then they had the most exquisite little basket-work dwellings hidden away amongst them, and in the distance was a bamboo bridge--a sort of magnified human spider’s web. Looking straight along the street from the bridge was another pretty view--little shops full of gaily coloured things, such as scarlet jamboa fruit, yellow bananas, pomelas, melons, pines, and hot peppers of the brightest reds and greens. Pretty birds in bamboo cages, people in every shade of purple, scarlet, pink, turquoise blue, emerald green, and lemon yellow; small copper-coloured children carrying all their garments on the tops of their heads, grass-cutters carrying inverted cones of green fastened to their bamboos and almost hiding them. Long avenues of huge banyan trees bordered the principal drive to the palace, with large bird’s-nest ferns growing on their branches, each tree forming a small plantation of itself, with its hanging roots and offsets from the branches. Herds of spotted deer used to rest in the shade under these trees, and parties of the great crested ground pigeon, as big as turkeys, were always to be found there. [Illustration: THE PALM HOUSE] The Botanic Garden near Rio de Janeiro, also, has tropical features we can hardly match, such as its colonnade of palms, a living temple overtopping the suburban avenues in which tram lines have been planted by foreign capital. Then the Gardens of Peradenia in Ceylon gather such a bouquet of choice flora as an enraptured traveller compares to “the paradise of some Eastern tale, designed and inhabited by invisible genii.” Our Australian colonies, so well off for sun, if not for water, are undertaking to show the Old Country what can be done in this way by children freed from some of her disadvantages. Sydney, besides its rich Botanic Gardens, can afford to keep stretches of wild scenery preserved in all their unkempt luxuriance; and behind Melbourne Nature itself has a giant grove of gum-trees, rising from the undergrowth of ferns that with us would rank as tall trees. And, of course, in many other parts of the world, comparatively little expense can bring together a collection of our rare and delicate blooms, there ranking as weeds.