character and origin of its population. The peach-stone is
called Kandy, and the people Kandyans. These are a desperate variety of the
tiger-man, agile and fierce as he is, though smooth, insinuating, and full
of subtlety as a snake, even to the moment of crouching for their last
fatal spring. On the other hand the people of the engirdling zone are
called the Cinghalese, spelled according to fancy of us authors and
compositors, who legislate for the spelling of the British empire, with an
S or a C. As to moral virtue, in the sense of integrity or fixed principle,
there is not much lost upon either race: in that point they are "much of a
muchness." They are also both respectable for their attainments in
cowardice; but with this difference, that the Cinghalese are soft, inert,
passive cowards: but your Kandyan is a ferocious little bloody coward, full
of mischief as a monkey, grinning with desperation, laughing like a hyena,
or chattering if you vex him, and never to be trusted for a moment. The
reader now understands why we described the Ceylonese man as a tiger-cat in
his noblest division: for, after all, these dangerous gentlemen in the
peach-stone are a more promising race than the silky and nerveless
population surrounding them. You can strike no fire out of the Cinghalese:
but the Kandyans show fight continually, and would even persist in
fighting, if there were in this world no gunpowder, (which exceedingly they
dislike,) and if their allowance of arrack were greater.

Surely this is the very strangest spectacle exhibited on earth: a kingdom
within a kingdom, an _imperium in imperio_, settled and maintaining itself
for centuries in defiance of all that Pagan, that Mahommedan, that Jew, or
that Christian, could do. The reader will remember the case of the British
envoy to Geneva, who being ordered in great wrath to "quit the territories
of the republic in twenty-four hours," replied, "By all means: in ten
minutes." And here was a little bantam kingdom, not much bigger than the
irate republic, having its separate sultan, with full-mounted
establishment of peacock's feathers, white elephants, Moorish eunuchs,
armies, cymbals, dulcimers, and all kinds of music, tormentors, and
executioners; whilst his majesty crowed defiance across the ocean to all
other kings, rajahs, soldans, kesars, "flowery" emperors, and
"golden-feet," east or west, be the same more or less; and really with
some reason. For though it certainly _is_