shadow of rough, ragged mountains, at the wharves of a little city shaded with cocoanut, mango, and other tropical trees. The vegetation reminds us of Ceylon. There are oranges growing in the gardens, and banana plants hang over the fences and whisper a welcome as we walk through the streets.

We are met on the docks by a motley crowd of East Indians, Arabs, Chinese, and black-skinned Africans, some of whom offer to guide us about. We see bags of sugar piled up on the wharves, and in some parts of the town the air smells like new-made molasses.

Mauritius is famous for its sugar. It was little more than a forest when it came into the hands of the English about a century ago, but they have turned it into a sugar plantation. They have brought laborers from India, Africa, and China to work the cane fields, and millions of pounds of unrefined sugar are now exported every year. The island is only about one fifth as large as Porto Rico, but it is thickly settled on account of the rich soil. It has more than two hundred thousand Hindus, and a large number of Africans and natives of Madagascar. Many of the Hindus and Chinese have saved money and now own plantations themselves. They have stores in Port Louis, and much of the business is done by them.

We ride out on the railroads which lead from the capital to different parts of the island, now passing through a cocoanut grove, and now getting a glimpse of a vanilla plantation. Most of the way is through sugar estates, where dark-skinned men and women are working away plowing, planting, and cutting the cane. We stop at a factory to see the juice pressed out and made into sugar,

and then return to Port Louis just in time to catch the boat for Reunion, a little island belonging to the French, 135 miles away and not far out of our route to Tamatave (tä-ma-täv'), the chief port on the eastern coast of Madagascar.

Reunion is of much the same character as Mauritius, save that it is a little larger, more mountainous, and less fertile. Its chief port is St. Denis, a city of about forty thousand people, made up of East Indians and Africans, with many French merchants and planters. The language is French, and we find it hard to make ourselves understood.

We take trips out into the country, visiting the sugar plantations and also those which produce coffee, cacao, and vanilla. From the vanilla plant comes the extract which we use for flavoring puddings, cakes, ice creams, and candies. It is a climbing plant, with a long, fleshy, fruitlike pod from which the extract is made. The plants are grown from cuttings set out in the shade. trained upon stakes and carefully cared for.

They are

At three

years they produce fruit, after which they bear for many years. We walk through the plantations under the trees, now and then pulling off a pod and biting into it, trying to imagine that it has the flavor of the vanilla ice cream which tastes so good at our homes, but which, alas! it is impossible to get away out here in this hot Indian Ocean.

T is almost four hundred miles from St. Denis to Tama

IT.

tave. The voyage takes about two days on our slowgoing steamer, and it is early morning when the cabin boy tells us to get up, for we are in sight of Madagascar. jump from our beds and look out of the portholes. Our

We

vessel is sailing along a low coast, densely wooded, and backed by high mountains covered with green and half hidden in low-hanging clouds. That coast is a part of Madagascar, an island almost as long as Sumatra and of the same general shape, although wider.

Madagascar consists of two great natural divisions: an interior plateau rising several thousand feet above the sea, with mountain peaks, some of which are almost two miles in height, extending above it; and a comparatively level country surrounding the highlands and sloping down to the sea. The interior plateau, owing to its altitude, has a good climate; but the low coast lands are unhealthy and malarious. They are bordered with a dense belt of forest which extends far up the slopes of the plateau; and upon the plateau itself are rolling prairies covered with grass and spotted with farms. The island is rich. Its soil is fertile, and its mountains have deposits of gold, copper, iron, sulphur, and lead.

We are now about halfway down the eastern coast, approaching Tamatave, its principal port. Now our steamer turns and moves slowly in toward the shore. We pass through an opening in the coral reef, and come to anchor at a long pier in an excellent harbor before a town unlike any we have yet seen.

There are cocoanut, mango, and bamboo trees close to the beach, and back of it is a city of one-storied and twostoried, bright-colored houses, with a church tower or steeple here and there rising above it. Off at one side are many thatched huts, the homes of the natives, and behind are cultivated lands extending to the hills. The town is low and sandy, and right on the beach.