November i, i8go.] 
THE TROPICAL AQRICULTURfST. 
best way of showing its excellence, anrl, indeed, it 
would be easy to fill a column or two with the apt 
things he says of that famous expe>-t Pekoe Puekle. 
Puokle, we are told, was a capital tea-taster, with 
a fine vocabulary of technical expletives and adjectives. 
Thus the samples on which he pronounced came to 
be described as “ handsome, curly, glazed, bright, 
black, wiry, glossy, even, regular, tippy, and curion.s 
in appearance; whilst their drinking qualities were 
reported on as strong, flavoury. fuU, rich, ripe, brisk, 
fruity, thick, fine, creamy, pungent, malty, sweet, good, 
high-fired, brisk, burnt, rasping, desirable, clean, and 
superfine. But others would occasionally disgrace 
themselve.s and sink into the turpitude of being dull, 
broken, dusty, flat, choppy, chaffy, uneven, crapey, 
mixed, round, shottv, stalky, grey, red, brown, green- 
ish, dull, black, and tipless in leaf ; whilst in liquor 
they were branded as soft, weak, burnt, scorched, coarse, 
thin, extra thin, undesirable, waiting flavour, wanting 
qualify, wanting briskness, bakey, fcas‘y, poor, and 
bad.” In sad contrast to Pekoe Puekle we have 
Jack Boyce, an Oxford Man and old Etonian : — “ tie’s 
the kindest-hearted man in Dulgoorie, and the weakest 
in a way. He has run through a fortune and 
has one foot in the grave, at d yet ho passe.s hia 
life in keeping open house for the district and passing the 
bottle round. It is the old story, of course, lifting his 
little finger too often.” His bungalow was popularly 
known as the Bed Lion, and was open night and day 
“ of man and beast,” Durand tried to rescue him from 
the toadies and harpies who flattered his failings and 
used his house as an hostebry, and was, as a consequence, 
sent to Coventry by the planting communily as a body. 
Boyce came, of course, to “the s’x-hy-two freehold 
in the planters’ churchyard;” and with hispa'lntic 
death the better men among the Dulgoorie planters 
began to respect the energy, independence and 
character displayed hv young’ Durand in his single- 
liandi d combat against the evil influences of the district. 
His warmest supporter was a half-pay lieutenant of 
the old Indian Navy — Lieutenant Marling, a quaint, 
carbbed, old salt, who wasted his half pay in trying 
to grow tea so bad that even the tobacconists would 
no buy it for packing cheroots in. Durand came 
across the Lieutenant first, as the old man, in a voice 
broken with sobs, was reading the Burial Service on 
a grave dug in the middle of a grim, fantastic land- 
slip ; — “Do you know,” asked the L’euteuant, “can 
you guess over whom I read the funeral service just 
now !" “ No.” “ Then I’ll tell you, for it’s my_ duty. 
It was over a native woman. A heathen, if you 
will, but my wife. Sir — before Heaven my wife — 
even though she and I were never married. Perhaps’’ 
— he went on in a so'ter tone — “ perhaps I have 
done wrong. Blaybe I hive led you into an act 
which is agaii st your re'igious principles. She had 
no right, a parson might, say, to the .services of 
the C'hrist'an Church, even though she prayed to the 
Ohristisn’s God. I say she had. But, then, 1 
loved her. And believe me. Sir, I meant no harm.” 
This strange meeting Ird to a singularly devoted 
friendship. Lieutenant M„rlii g is so happily conceived 
that we feel quite sorry when his eccentricities are, 
however amusingly, exaggerated ; as, for instance, when 
Durand recognized the familiar voice of the Lieutenant 
outside his bungalow : — “ Starboard you Lubbers !” 
Then after a few seconds — “ Port your helium — 
hard-a-port !” They had reached the bungalow. 
“ B’lay ! B’lay 1 Easy ! St.amI by !” And finally — 
“ Le’ go !’’ alluding doubtless to an anchor. “ Le’ go” 
they did — a trifle too promptly. “Darn the lubbers !” 
> oared a crushed voice from within, as a movement in 
1 he c.auvas ceiling of the palanquin was suggestive 
i f a head being unexpectedly shot into it from be- 
low. “ Darn the lobbo'-i ! She’s gone agrauocl!” 
Lieutenant Marliuii’s funeral service, however pathe- 
tic, hints at something amiss in the tea-planters’ 
little cre’e: — “The groate.st d, aivback of all,” we read, 
“in a t a-pl' ntii'g conimuni y in tlio-e days was the 
want of woman’s presence and iufln nee, and it lowered 
the w’hole s'an ’ard f morality and refinement, and 
made iho school a bad one fora young man to enter, 
and full of vicious temptations to which many a Lad, 
just out from homo and a refined family circle, yielded, 
3^1 
and so went to the bad.” The ladies of Dulgoorie 
in those days were a mixed h.t; — “Some were"^ civil 
without being attractive, and me or two went in for 
being very superior ; whilst others dropped their ‘ h’.s ’ 
or wore loud colon s, or drove niggers, or rtij rlivers 
things which individualised them unplensnntly, fo that 
in their presence Durand had as.serted himself because 
he felt that to be shy before them was a sort of 
surrender of his social status. And then they all talked 
Tba.” Durand happily, aud almost by accident, stum- 
bled across a most bewitching little lady, Sibyl Adair, 
as she was giving her brothers, Isaac Newton and 
Colenso, their morning le.sson. Her father, Mr. Lionel 
Alair, had been a mathematical tutor at Cambridge, 
and had bad a mathematical bee in bis bonnet ever 
since “ I am engaged,” coninmnced Mr. Adair, “ in 
a work of Considerable Depth. A Treatise on the 
Higher Mathematics. It is an Absorb’ug T sk.” He 
might have said it vvas a Screaming Farce, if it were 
not that this wretched Work that wag to be, had 
mined the whole fami y. When Mr. Adair went to 
look round the factory he would take up the lid of 
a tea chest, and work out problems on it with a. piece 
of charcoil; and if he went into the Plantation to 
inspect tie coolies, he would sit down on llij first 
convenifnt bank and sum out some'hing on the hack 
of an envelope ; — “No wonder that the men were o-ettino- 
idle and lazy, and that the iat Jemedar, or native 
overseer, was nothing more or less than the master 
of the estate instead of its servant.” And the tea 
sold badly, and there w'as so little of it, and it was 
sfohn right and left. Little Miss Sibyl — she was 
barely seventeen — had the cares of a large fam ly 
on her banns, and did a good deal, too, to pr. vent 
the tea garden going to the dogs. Durand sympa- 
thized with her struggles oifbaud: — ' Oh, Mr. Durand,” 
she exclaimed, “ you don’t know what you are saviim' ! 
Papa will never leave this place. He is getting 
deeper and deeper in his Work every year, arid 1ms nol; 
the slightest inclination f. r elmnge. When Mamma 
was alive she made him come out of his shell, 
but since she died he has had it all his own way 
with those — those — those heastly mathematics!” Of 
course, the.se two inexpeiienced young peonle fell in 
love with one another at once, am] their chequered 
love-story is told tenderly and v ry pre’tilv. It is 
in its way a dejightfuliy bashful and idyllic in- 
cident. The subsidiary characters are es goo I and 
true to life as those we have picked out. Captain 
Goad a buPy and a coward, who swagge s on his 
title, talks of the “Service,” and avoids mentioning 
the regiment in which he was broke, mu»t have 
been a familiar type in tlu old planting days. 
Mr. Loucb, of the firm of Cnmmiug, .Tones & 
Go., T. a Agents, and inve tor of the Biv Tea 
Amalfamation Scheme, is probably stili rememb ered 
in Calcutta. Even at tbir geographical distance some 
of the details of his career .xee’u faud'iar, though 
we do not suppose that, b. fore boliiug fiom Calcutta 
(or Jutepore), he ever so'd liis famous carriage and 
pair ten times over, or that he ever .ncluiilly bought 
Durand’s tea estate for a lakh of ruuee.s worth of 
forged shares, and tlien branded Durand as the forger. 
For the plot of the story our readers must go to 
the “Tea I’lauters’ Romance’’ itself, and see there 
how “The Dea l Man’s Gift ” put Lietitanaii* Mailing’s 
twenty-acre estate in the middle of that Golgotha of 
stone and desolation, the Landslip, into Durai d’s hands, 
and how _ mysteriously Durand was directed to the 
discovery in the Landslip of some odd htmdied-weighfs 
of rough, hut enormous, sapphires. These wonderful 
stones set everything right. It is a real pleasure to 
congratulate Mr. C nipton on a book that, coming 
from any rccogni/.ed English noveli,-t at horn.’, would 
have won siicc' ss as a remarkable iftbri of iniagiu'i- 
tion. As Mr. Compton knows what he writes aboir, 
he must, we suppose, lie content to think that he has 
told his own experiences iu his own wa. and an 
admirable way it is. If his tea is o: ly half a.s good 
S3 his hiok, Mr. Coiopio.i should, h werer, have no 
reason to giumble. Ke was b yc t’ed at Slincing 
Lane, if we remember rightly, for selling his tens in an 
original way. His old enemies will find it difficult to hoy. 
cotthis book. It is a right good “ chop.”— Ti>«cso/ India. 
