AVOCA. , 127 



shed, where as good meals are cooked as in anj^ London 

 kitchen. Other sheds hold the servants and hangers-on, the 

 horses and mules ; and as the establishment grows more will 

 be added, and the house itself will probably expand laterally, 

 like a peripheral Greek temple, by rows of posts, probably 

 of palm-stems thatched over with wooden shingle or with the 

 leaves of the Timit^ palm. If ladies come to inhabit the 

 camp, fresh rooms will be partitioned off by boardings as high 

 as the eaves, leaving the roof within open and common, for 

 the sake of air. Soon, no regular garden, but beautiful flower- 

 ing shrubs Crotons, Dracaenas, and Cereuses, will be planted ; 

 ofreat bushes of Bauhinia and blue Petr?ea will roll their loner 

 curved shoots over and over each other; Gardenias fill the 

 air with fragrance ; and the Bougainvillia or the Clerodendron 

 cover some arbour with lilac or white racemes. 



But this camp had not yet arrived at so high a state of 

 civilization. All round it, almost up to the very doors, a 

 tangle of logs, stumps, branches, dead ropes and nets of 

 liane, lay still in the process of clearing ; and the ground 

 was seemingly as waste, as it was difficult often impossible 

 to cross. A second glance, however, showed that, amongst 

 the stumps and logs, Indian corn was planted everywhere; 

 and that a few months would give a crop which would 

 richly repay the clearing, over and above the fact that the 



^ Manicaria. 



