Fruits are of many varieties; the most luscious are the mangoes. There is only one crop a year; the season lasts from April to July. It is a long, kidney-shaped fruit. It seems to me most delicious, but some do not like it at all. The flavor has the richness and sweetness of every fruit that one can think of. They disagree with some persons and give rise to a heat rash. For their sweet sake, I took chances and ended by making a business of eating and taking the consequences. The mango tree has fine green satin leaves; the fruit is not allowed to ripen on the tree. The natives pick mangoes as we pick choice pears and let them ripen before eating. They handle them just as carefully, and place them in baskets that hold just one layer. The best mangoes are sometimes fifty cents a piece. The fruit that stands next in favor is the chico. It looks not unlike a russet apple on the outside, but the inside has, when ripe, a brown meat and four or five black seeds quite like watermelon seeds. It is rich and can be eaten with impunity.

The banana grows everywhere, and its varieties are as numerous as those of our apple; its colors, its sizes, manifold. Some about the size of one’s finger are deliciously sweet and juicy. They grow seemingly without any cultivation whatever, by the road as freely as in the gardens. Guavas are plentiful, oranges abundant but poor in quality. The pomelo is like our “grape fruit,” but larger, less bitter and less juicy. Cut into squares or sections and served with a sauce of white of egg and sugar beaten together it is a delicious dish.

There are no strawberries or raspberries, but many kinds of small fruits, none of which I considered at all palatable, although some of them looked delicious hanging upon the trees or bushes. There is a small green kind of cherry full of tiny seeds that the natives prize and enjoy. The fruits of one island are common to all.

The flora of the country was not seen at its best; many of the natives told me. Trees, shrubs, gardens and plantations had been trampled by both armies and left to perish. Our government took up the work of restoration as soon as possible. The few roses that I saw were not of a particularly good quality, nor did they have any fragrance. No one can ever know what joy thrilled me when one day I found some old fashioned four o’clocks growing in the church yard. The natives do not care to use the natural flowers in the graceful sprays or luxuriant clusters in which they grow. They usually stick them on the sharp spikes of some small palm or wind them on a little stick to make a cone or set the spikelets side by side in a flat block. They much prefer artificial stiffness to natural grace. In the hundreds of funeral ceremonies that I saw I never noticed the use of a single natural blossom. The flowers were all artificial, of silk, paper, or tissue. One reason, perhaps, of this choice is that all vegetation is infested with ants; they can scarcely be seen, but, oh, they can be felt! The first time I was out driving I begged the guard to gather me huge bunches of most exquisite blooms but I was soon eager to throw them all out; the ants swarmed upon me and drove me nearly frantic. I learned to shun my own garden paths and to content myself with looking out of the window on the plants below. There are many birds but no songsters.

The betel nut is about the size of a walnut. The kernel is white like the cocoanut. They wrap a bit of this kernel with a pinch of air-slacked lime in a pepper leaf, then chew, chew, all day, and in intervals of chewing they spray the vividly colored saliva on door-step, pavement and church floor.

I often watched the natives climb the tall cocoanut trees, about eighty feet high, with only the fine fern-like leaves at the extreme top. These trees yield twenty to fifty cocoanuts per month and live to a great age. No one can have any idea of the delicious milk until he has drunk it fresh from the recently gathered nuts. A young native will climb as nimbly and as swiftly as a monkey, and will be as unfettered by dress as his Darwinian brother. The fruit is severed from the tree by the useful bolo.

The flowers in the parks when I saw them had all been trampled into the mud by the soldiers of both armies, but I was told that they had been very beautiful. There were also large trees, bearing huge clusters of blooms; one bunch had seventy-five blossoms, each as large as a fair sized nasturtium. These are called Fire or Fever Trees, since they have the appearance of being on fire and bloom in the hot season when fever is most prevalent. Other trees whose name I do not recall bear equally large clusters of purple flowers. The palms are large and grow in great luxuriance, and the double hibiscus look like large pinks.