s often added
a necklace of bright sea-shells mixed with shark's teeth, completing the
oddest outfit that can well be conceived of for a human being. Savagery
tinctured with civilization. The native children of six, eight, and ten,
were subjects of particular interest, the boys especially, who were
remarkably handsome, clean-limbed, with skins shining like satin, and
brown as hazel nuts. These boys and girls have large, brilliant, and
intensely black eyes, with a promise of good intelligence, but their
possibilities remain unfulfilled amid such associations as they are born
to. They soon subside into languid, sensuous creatures.

As we sat shaded by the broad piazza in the midday, the native jugglers
and snake-charmers would come, and, squatting in the blazing sun, beg us
to give heed to their tricks. They are singularly clever, these Indian
mountebanks, especially in sleight of hand tricks. The serpents which
they handle with such freedom are of the deadly cobra species, fatally
poisonous when their fangs penetrate the flesh, though doubtless when
exhibited in this manner they have been deprived of their natural means
of defense. True to their native instinct, however, these cobras were
more than once seen to strike at the bare arms and legs of the
performers. Rooks, of which there were thousands about the house, flew
in and out at the open doors and windows, after their own free will,
lighting confidently on the back of one's chair and trying the texture
of his coat with their sharp bills. No one molests them here or makes
them afraid. They are far tamer than are domestic fowls in America, for
they are never killed and eaten like hens and chickens. A Singhalese's
religion will not permit him to kill anything, except wild beasts in
self-defense. The vegetation is what might be expected within so few
miles of the equator: beautiful and prolific in the extreme. The
cinnamon fields are so thrifty as to form a wilderness of green, though
growing but four or five feet in height, and a drive through them was
like a poetical inspiration.

The cinnamon bush is a species of laurel, and bears a white, scentless
flower, which is succeeded by a small, oblong berry, scarcely as large
as a pea. The spice of commerce is the inner bark of the shrub, the
branches of which are cut and peeled twice in the course of the
year,--say about Christmas and midsummer. The plantations resemble a
thick, tangled copse, without any regularity, and