are a great nuisance during the rainy season,
but nowhere to such a degree as in the
vicinity of an indigo factory; where they
are attracted by the smell. When the servants
are preparing the table for a meal,
they put a white muslin cloth over the
plates, cups and saucers, and in an instant
it is covered with black flies. Before taking
off the muslin cloth, the bearer begins
pulling the large heavy punkah or fan,
which has generally a deep fringe at the
edge of it; the waiters whisk about small
fans in every direction to keep the flies
from off the table; and as soon as the tea is
poured out, a silver cover is put over the cup.

  In the cold season, from November to
March, the planter generally spends a month
in one of the towns, for the purpose of negotiating
the sale of his indigo.

  One of the first records to be found of
the commerce in indigo occurs in a letter
addressed by Lord Bacon to King James,
supporting some complaints made by the
East India Company, in which he says that
in return for English commodities, we received
from India great quantities of indigo.
And a work, entitled the Merchant's Map
of Commerce, published in sixteen hundred
and thirty-eight by Lewis Roberts, says, we
then exported from England a considerable
quantity of indigo to Turkey and Italy.
Davenant, in his Discourses on the Public
Revenues and Trade, mentions some exports
of indigo from America in sixteen hundred
and eighty-two. About the year seventeen
hundred and thirty-two, the indigo-plant was
extensively grown, and its produce exported
from Jamaica and the sugar islands;
nevertheless England was obliged to pay
more than two hundred thousand pounds
annually to France for indigo. Some Carolina
rice-planters found they were overstocking
the European market with rice, and began
to cultivate indigo; and, in seventeen hundred
and forty-seven, they sent nearly two thousand
pounds of indigo to England.  Parliament
having granted a bounty of sixpence per
hundredweight on all indigo grown in any
of our American colonies and imported into
England, the cultivation of the blue-dye plant
continued to be pursued in Carolina with
such success that, in about ten years, the
export of indigo amounted to four hundred
thousand pounds a-year.

  The cultivation of the indigo plant is carried
on at present in India, Egypt, and America;
but the best indigo paste is manufactured in
the Bengal Presidency.  French, Germans,
Italians, and the Arabs have all in turn tried
to cultivate the indigo bearer in their own
countries; and they have always failed, owing
to the plant requiring a tropical climate for
the production of the indigotine or blue
colouring matter.

  Respecting this precious chemical principle,
the chemists tell us, that when a bit of indigo-paste
is subjected to the influence of
great heat, purplish vapours are seen rising
from it, which, condensing upon cold bodies,
form brilliant purple needles of indigotine.

LOST ALICE.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

  Why did I marry her? I often asked
myself the question, in the days that succeeded
our honeymoon.  By right, I should have
married no one.  Yet I loved her, as I love
her still.

  She was, perhaps, the strangest character
of her age. In her girlhood, I could not comprehend
her; and I often think, when I raise
my eyes to her grave, quiet face, as she sits opposite
me at dinner, that I do not comprehend
her yet.  There are many thoughts working
in her brain of which I know nothing, and
flashes of feeling look out at her eyes now
and then, and go back again, as captives
might steal a glimpse of the outer world
through their prison bars, and turn to their
brick-walled solitude once more. She is my
wife.  I have her and hold her as no other can.
She bears my name, and sits at the head of my
table; she rides beside me in my carriage, or
takes my arm as we walk; and yet I know
and feel, all the time, that the darling of my
past has fled from me for ever, and that it is
only the ghost of the gay Alice, whom I won
in all the bloom of her bright youth, that
lingers near me now.

  She was not a child when I married her,
though she was very young.  I mean, that life
had taught her lessons which are generally
given only to the grey-haired, and had laid
burdens upon her which belong of right to the
old.  She had been an unloved child, and at
the age of sixteen she was left to herself, and
entirely dependent on her own exertions.
Friends and family she had none, so she was
accustomed laughingly to say; but I have
since found that her sisters were living, and
in happy homes, even at the time when she
accepted that awful trust of herself, and went
out of the great world to fulfil it.  Of this
part of her life she never speaks; but one
who knew her then has told me much.  It
was a time of struggle and pain, as well it
might have been.  Fresh from the life of a
large boarding-school, she was little fitted for
the bustle of a great selfish city; and the
tears come to my eyes as I think, with a kind
of wonder, on the child who pushed her way
through difficulties at which strong men have
quailed, and made herself a name, and a position,
and a home.  She was a writer,—at first
a drudge, for the weekly press, poorly paid,
and unappreciated.  By-and-by, brighter
days dawned, and the wolf went away from
the door.  She was admired, read, sought
after, and—above all—paid.  Even then, she
could not use the wisdom she had purchased
at so dear a rate.  She held her heart in her
hand, and it was wrung and tortured every
day.