Falling in Love

13. De Banana

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 n***o-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, banan, &c., is not already a

Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it

shall be in future. Linnus 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 gis-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 n***o, 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 Linnan 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, _ 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, _ 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

_chaumire_.) 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 Linnus

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 n***o 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 _ la matre d'htel_ 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 Mller's especial _protg_, 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 Linnus, 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 s**o do you really see that you get it? and

how many entirely different objects described as s**o 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 n*****s 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.