COOKERY.

Their domestic economy (I speak of the houses of the chiefs) seemed better regulated than it generally is in these countries; they seemed tolerably advanced in the art of cookery, and had much variety of food; such as the flesh of deer, which they take in rattan snares, wild ducks, abounding on the lake; green pigeons, quails innumerable; and a variety of fish beside the summah already mentioned, and the ikan gadis, a species of carp which attains to a greater size here than in the rivers.

ESCULENT VEGETABLES.

The potato, which was introduced there many years ago, is now a common article of food, and cultivated with some attention.  Their plantations supply many esculent herbs, fruits, and roots; but the coconut, although reared as a curiosity, is abortive in these inland regions, and its place is supplied by the buah kras (Juglans camirium), of which they also make their torches.  Excellent tobacco is grown there, also cotton and indigo, the small leafed kind.  They get some silk from Palembang, and rear a little themselves.  The communication is more frequent with the north-west shore than with the eastern, and of late, since the English have been settled at Pulo Chinco, they prefer going there for opium to the more tedious (though less distant) journey by which they formerly sought it at Moco-moco.

GOLD.

In their cockpits the gold-scales are frequent, and I have seen considerable quantities weighed out by the losers.  This metal, I am informed, they get in their own country, although they studiously evaded all inquiries on the subject.

GUNPOWDER.

They make gunpowder, and it is a common sport among the young boys to fire it out of bamboos.  In order to increase its strength, in their opinion, they mingle it with pepper-dust.

LEPERS.

In a small recess on the margin of the lake, overhung with very rugged cliffs and accessible only by water, I saw one of those receptacles of misery to which the leprous and others afflicted with diseases supposed to be contagious are banished.  I landed much against the remonstrances of my conductors, who would not quit the boat.  There were in all seven of these unfortunate people basking on the beach and warming the wretched remains of their bodies in the sun.  They were fed at stated periods by the joint contribution of the neighbouring villages, and I was given to understand that any attempt to quit this horrid exile was punished with death.

PECULIAR PLANTS.

I had little time for botanizing; but I found there many plants unknown to the lowlands.  Among them were a species of prune, the water-hemlock, and the strawberry.  This last was like that species which grows in our woods; but it was insipid.  I brought the roots with me to Fort Marlborough, where it lingered a year or two after fruiting and gradually died.* I found there also a beautiful kind of the Hedychium coronarium, now ranked among the kaempferias.  It was of a pale orange, and had a most grateful odour.  The girls wear it in their hair, and its beautiful head of lily flowers is used in the silent language of love, to the practice of which, during your stay here, I suppose you were no stranger, and which indicates a delicacy of sentiment one would scarcely expect to find in the character of so rude a people.