ngs. In these far countries the
white people do seem to run remarkably to pets. Our host in Cawnpore had
a fine collection of birds--the finest we saw in a private house in
India. And in Colombo, Dr. Murray's great compound and commodious
bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods:
frisky little squirrels; a Ceylon mina walking sociably about the house;
a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without
motion of its beak; also chuckled; a monkey in a cage on the back
veranda, and some more out in the trees; also a number of beautiful
macaws in the trees; and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds
not known to me. But no cat. Yet a cat would have liked that place.

April 9. Tea-planting is the great business in Ceylon, now. A passenger
says it often pays 40 per cent. on the investment. Says there is a boom.

April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is
about the divinest color known to nature.

It is strange and fine--Nature's lavish generosities to her creatures.
At least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided
a home that is nobly spacious--a home which is forty miles deep and
envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those
that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain--a domain which is
miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has
cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given
him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining
one-fifth--the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the
one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing
else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a
single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to
get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to
extend the blessings of civilization with. Yet man, in his simplicity
and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the
important member of the family--in fact, her favorite. Surely, it must
occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of
showing it.

Afternoon. The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic
voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and
had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about
two-thirds