We did not, as in former days, keep steadily to a regular pace without stopping, even for hours at a time, and walking in comparative quiet. For the hammock carriers go very rapidly, on a dog-trot, continually shouting, and a white man follows immediately behind each hammock. They repeat a regular call and response, half song, half shout, as if to sustain their animation and courage. What wonderful voices they have! The forest, startled from her deep repose as we pass along, rebounds with shout and answering echo, while we dash on over height and depth, over rock and stream and mire, for an hour. Then, out of breath and in copious perspiration, we sit down for fifteen or twenty minutes, and at the word of command we are off again with a dash and a shout. It is all very pleasant and a great improvement on the old way, although one pays very little attention to the forest and is wholly oblivious to its moods. But the old way is still the regular way on all roads except those few which the white man has undertaken to improve. And this disposition to “improve” everything he puts his hand to is a radical difference between the native and the white man. The mental habit of the native is contentment with things as they are; in which he is far more happy than fortunate. He would let this old world, or this old “bush” as he calls it, stay as it is to the end of time. The unhappy restlessness of the white man, his dissatisfaction with what he has and his longing for what he has not, his eagerness for change and “improvement,” the native is sometimes disposed to regard as a morbid mental disease. But the greatest wonder of it is that the white man includes the native himself in his program of improvement. He finds him a denizen of the forest, his mental habitudes like her changing moods, now sullen and cruel, now gentle and cheerful for a little while, partaking of her darkness mingled here and there with broken beams of light; and as he clears a way through the deep forest making the darkness light, so he labours that a gleam of heaven’s light may shine down into the benighted native soul; that it may lighten the path of his destiny more and more, and lead him on, in ways of purity and peace, till the gleam become the “perfect day.” V THE CAMP-FIRE If it is dreadful to be overtaken in the forest by the punctual night of the tropics, while unprepared, without camp or comfort, yet, to the weary man, after a good bath and a good supper, and with a good bed awaiting him, the brief period of the departing day and the increasing camp-fire glow, the smell of wood smoke and the crackle of the burning log, are a delightful experience.