After this was over, as I had expressed a wish to see more of his house, I was taken across a court to another ground- floor room, and was startled by finding myself suddenly introduced to Madame la Régente, an odd little woman, with a wizened face, and mouth and teeth blackened by betel nut.

Coolie, it seems, who came back to find his betel-box.

Over the greater part of India the natives use the Hindustanee name supari, but by Englishmen it is best known as the betel nut, because it is always found in company with the betel leaf, with which, however, it has no more connection than strawberries have with cream.

Outwardly it produces effects which are visible enough, to wit, a most copious flow of saliva, which is dyed deep red by the juice of the nut, so that a betel nut chewer seems to go about spitting blood all the day.

Divided into small pieces, it is placed in the center of a small ball made of the tender leaves of the buyo or betel pepper, lightly covered with slacked lime, and this composition constitutes the celebrated betel of Asia, or, as it is here called, the buyo, the latter differing from that used in India, inasmuch only as it contains cardamomom.

After some time areca nuts and betel leaves were brought on silver plates, which the queen herself handed to us; this is a sign that the audience is at an end, and visitors cannot leave until it is made.

They are a source of great attraction to the passing sailors, who resort to them for eating, drinking, and other convivialities; and while away the time there in gambling, betel chewing, and smoking, with idle companions of both sexes.

In life the betel vine climbs up the stem of the areca palm, and in death the areca nut is rolled in a shroud of the betel leaf and the two are munched together.

Among other articles of native manufacture I may mention large baked earthen pots* used in cooking, also very neatly made round flat-bottomed baskets in sets of four, partially fitting into each other, with a woven belt to suspend them from the shoulders byin these various small articles are carried, among them the spatula and calabash, with lime to be used in betel chewingand a netted bag, a foot and a half in width and one in depth.

All our visitors had their teeth darkened with the practice of betel chewingwe saw them use the leaf of the betel pepper, the green areca nut, and lime, the last carried in a small calabash with a spatula.

The betel nut harvest is something of the nature of an acrobatic performance, for the crop is not on the ground, but on poles forty or fifty feet high.

buyo: The masticatory prepared by wrapping a piece of areca-nut with a little shell-lime in a betel-leafthe pan of British India.

Dates, pomegranates, and areca nuts cut up and mixed with sugar-paste pinned with cloves into a betel leafthese constituted the dessert.

About noon they left Don Escudero's, and took a road leading to the southward and eastward, through a luxuriant and beautiful country, well cultivated, and ornamented with lofty coconut trees, betel palms, and banana groves.