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It is in fact an enormous wooden shed, surround-ing three sides of a court, and consisting of a single series of rooms, with a verandah on either side of them. It was made in England for use in some totally different region, where it proved not to be wanted, and so it was sent here. It has been erected, or rather one may say pitched, on a dwarf eminence, overlooking a waterless river, and the plains stretching to the mountains ; and its boarded sides, and its red-tiled roofs, are by this time embowered in thickets of pines and eucalyptus trees. The court within has a fountain at the open end, a lawn-tennis court in the middle, and flower-beds round the borders, from which breaths of mignonette, when I was there, came wandering. My first evening, though agreeable in itself, I felt rather flat as an incident of life in a remote country. If the rooms had not all of them opened into a verandah, and their ceilings risen at a sharp angle into the roof, I might almost have fancied that Cyprus bad been a dream, from which I had just awoke and found myself disappointed in England. The walls were covered with familiar English papers. The carpets, though Eastern, had been most of them bought in London, and suggested nothing but civilised English life ; and the chairs, the sofas, and the books that littered the tables, had somehow an air of being within a day's journey of Piccadilly, and the Governor himself too, whom I will speak of under the name of Sir Eobert—I had last seen him in Curzon Street, 228 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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