284 THE FORESTS OF UPPER INDIA 



public schools, where boys are trusted as gentlemen, and 

 the French spying system, the product of democracy, is 

 happily not yet discovered. 



The garden was overgrowoi and tangled, but the growth 

 of crops was surprising. Quite a nursery of young teak- 

 trees had grown from seed put down in the spring, after 

 proper steeping of the hard nut-like capsules. They 

 were now nearly a foot high, with a few gigantic leaves 

 unfolding. The teak leaf is a huge one, up to 24 inches 

 long and 18 broad. The experiment was being tried of 

 planting teak in the plain by the Nerbudda, as more 

 convenient for the portage of the timber than the 

 Satpura hills, where the forest plantations were. The 

 teak-tree would grow much faster in the deep alluvial 

 soil of the plain than in the rock-bound hills, where the 

 roots could scarcely penetrate, and where the cost of 

 planting and digging and clearing the ground was con- 

 siderable. The most valuable timber tree in India is the 

 teak. From its immensely strong, heavy, straight- 

 grained timber the decks of our most modern iron-clads 

 and the best railway-carriages in England are made. Its 

 breaking strain is greater than that of oak. It still exists 

 in extensive forests in Burmah, where the Forest Depart- 

 ment has its finest reserves ; but in India the old trees 

 have been so steadily hacked down and used up with- 

 out thought for the future that a mature teak-tree is a 

 rarity. 



There were many localities in the Satpura hills where 

 young teak-trees were to be found growing naturally, 

 but only scattered here and there in out-of-the-way and 

 rocky ravines. The seedlings which grow naturally, or 

 are planted out in the forest plantations, if they are not 

 withered by drought in the hot weather, or scorched by 

 jungle fires, make most enormous shoots, the saplings 



