The advantage taken of the French N.C.0. may be similar to that taken of helpless. elephant every Sunday afternoon at the Botanical Gardens by its somewhat wily keeper. The Botanical Gur-dens in Saigon are very popular and every Sunday afternoon. they with people who show ion, not only for the monkeys and flowers and cool drinks, but for a huge unwieldly elephant that gives a lot of people fan immense amount of pleasure. This, animal is kept inside a strong von fence s0 visitors go there every Sunday afternoon and throw to i copper coins, the idea being to watch the elephant pick up. the coins and buy ginger bread. from {ts only too careful attendant, Sometimes, to show how clever the animal is,'the keeper will make it pick up two coppers at the time, and then the elephant how expensive things can be place where one man has a monopoly of ginger cakes. If the humble elephant had only another cake shop round the corner it might be able to save quite a bit of money, Both the French N.C.0. and the' elephant suffer inroly through monopolies.
The Botanical "and Zoological gardens in Saigon fill in a very pleasant afternoon and are well worth visiting. I went there in company with a young Chinese on his way abroad and TI could not. help noticing his wonder on seeing what he called a "Chinese temple" in the midst of the gardens. Immediately ho jumped to the cor that Saigon. at sometime or other must have belonged to China. I said to him, "You call it a Chinese temple, t call it a Buddhist temple, and as Buddhism came from India it did: not, necessarily' follow that the temple was Chinest However the young fellow was much obsessed with China's great fess and he could not follow me. Yet he would hardly say that a mosque in Shanghai proved. that Ghat great and noble city in the dim and hoary past had come from domewhore in the Persian Gulf.
Annam, oF as we call it Indo-China, is possessed of beautiful roads. The country itself though flat and "uninteresting around Saigon is charmingly hilly in the interior and practically every town of any importance is connected with the coast by means of well constructed highways. Right the jungle, an Annam has some Jungle, these well kept roadway; Penetrate: to the most distant frontiers. As 'a French colony. it does much credit to: the French People who have done everything in their power to make Indo-China, commercially and financially a suc-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.