There was one particularly pleasing custom, which I think should have been long ago introduced in this country. This was the fashion of bringing in fruit to the table covered with flowers. It is a custom that delights three senses at once--the smell, the sight, the taste. The first time I saw it was at the table of Mr. Whitelaw Reid, when he gave a dinner to me and my friends. After we had finished eating, I was asked if I did not wish for some of the fruit. I looked around and could not see fruit anywhere. In front of me were great masses of flowers in baskets, and I could readily detect the odor of fruits of various kinds, but they were invisible. I had almost decided that they were outside in the garden, and that possibly we were expected to pluck them from the trees, which, heavily laden with their burdens, hung temptingly against the windows. But no, the fruit was immediately before me, hidden beneath masses of cut flowers, in trays and baskets. I thought it a beautiful custom, and one that distinctly appeals to esthetic taste. It could well be introduced at Newport or Saratoga, or in Fifth Avenue mansions.
I regretted that Great Britain had lost, through a piece of carelessness, these magnificent islands now controlled by Holland; although the Dutch have done about as well as any other people could have done, I suppose. I believe it was because Lord Canning did not open his eastern mail one morning, that these islands became a possession of Holland instead of Great Britain.
I did not, on the occasion of my first visit, see anything of the Achinese. But I passed, in '92, on my last trip around the world, the northwestern end of Sumatra, and Captain Hogg, of the Moyune, pointed to the little town of Achin, built on piles. He said that in the interior the Dutch were still fighting the Achinese. They had then been fighting these desperate Mohammedans--converted Malays--for thirty years. I have since thought, having in view this prolonged struggle for freedom of the Mohammedan Malays of Sumatra, how desperate is our undertaking in the Philippines, where we are trying to subjugate a far larger population of Mohammedans, the Moros of the southern islands of the archipelago. Holland, I believe, has spent already something like 500,000,000 florins to exterminate the Achinese. It may cost us far more to exterminate the Moros.