The Planter's Curse.

For a bed, for every succeeding night

Halting, for more than three hours, including lights

after dark

Stabling horse for twenty-four hours, including straw

For a night-light

For an ordinary breakfast

For ditto dinner.

For a cold tiffin.

6

Cup of tea or coffee

Beer, per pint

N.B.-An ordinary breakfast consists of beefsteak and potatoes, ham and eggs, rice and curry.

An ordinary dinner will be meat, fowl, and two dishes of vegetables, one side-dish, curry and rice, bread and cheese.

H. O. RUSSELL, Govt. Agent.

I felt, on paying the score here, that I had dined at the table of the Empress of neighbouring India, and was so flustered at the idea that I nearly realized it to a fuller extent by forgetting to "remember the waiter."

There is a shrub much seen hereabout that has got for itself the name of "The Planter's Curse." It is not indigenous but imported by some one of kith and kin to him who took the Cape weed, the rabbit, and the wrong sparrow to Australia. It spreads here with great rapidity, getting as much anathematised by the Cingalese as the Scotch thistle is by Australians.

It is all coffee, and talk of coffee, that is around me now. I learn that there are two hundred thousand acres of it cultivated in Ceylon. Though not indigenous, the climate is most favourable to its growth. It will, in some sort, grow anywhere in the island, even down to the hut-gardens by the seashore. That sort of coffee may be classed, however, with "husband's tea" for inferiority. The good kind is only found from fifteen hundred to five thousand feet up the hills, and the pick of it, the crême de la crême, is gathered only at an elevation of between two and three thousand feet.

The rice grows only up to the point where the good coffee begins. Where that ceases, tea commences and goes on. Beyond the line of that-at seven thousand feet-begins that

D

cinchona from which quinine is made. The coffee is, however, the best paying thing to Europeans, and the stock of it was valued at the time of my visit at six or seven millions sterling.

Other industries of the island are the distillation of citronella, cinnamon, and that lemon-grass with which the place abounds. I am shown here wasps' nests, over five feet in length, hanging from the trees. There is a moth shown to me from which silk is made of a quality known as Tussa. The cicada is heard all about grinding its knives, and here are curious things in the insect world not seen elsewhere. Of spiders and butterflies, as well as Buddhists, Ceylon is headquarters.

Those who travel in the East must, I find to my trouble, learn to like curries, and to eat them whether they like them or not. The yellow-looking messes only tempted me when nothing else was to be got, and that was too often the case. Along with the curry stuff there is given to one some fishlike a sprat dried to a chip. This abominable thing smells as bad, or worse, than it looks. It is called, in playful humour I suppose, “Bombay duck." It is so nasty that I prefer not only leaving it personally untouched, but also, for half an hour after the meal, not to talk with any one who has eaten of it. If necessary to do so, I take care to keep to the windward of the speaker. There are several queer things offered to the traveller in different parts of the world. Notably on the American overland route, at some of the outof-the-way stoppages in the desert, there is given to one a hash called "flummadiddle,” and a mixture of tea and coffee named "slumgullion," but neither of them were so nasty as this breath-perfuming Bombay duck. There are folks who like it, however, much as George the Second was pleased with the stalest oysters.

The rest-houses of Ceylon are wooden buildings of one story, and under charge of an attendant called an "appoo," and several native servants, all answering to the call of "boy." A broken English is jabbered by all of them. Leaving

Travelling Invalids.

35

Rambodda by the light of the rising moon, I go on horseback for fourteen miles, and then reach Newera Eliya (Neuralia), the sanitorium of Ceylon, over which hangs Pedrotallagalla-the top of which mountain is the highest land in Ceylon. Next to that lion of the place, the only show is the farm and brewery at which Sir Samuel Baker (Pasha Baker now, and Mr. Baker then) lived and worked for years, before beginning those travels which got him fame and knighthood.

Travellers who wish to get on with their work of seeing the world must avoid company. It seems sad to say so, but much that is true is not pleasant. I was always getting companions here and there, and strangely found them to be very encumbering. The fact was that they were more or less invalids, and mostly more so. Folks don't usually appear to go abroad until they are only fit for the infirmary. The world is seen by them with sickly eyes, and they travel only on the doctor's orders. The object of life is, of course, only to grind a purseful of money out of the world, and then to die and leave it for the benefit of others. Leaving business merely to see the world one lives in before leaving it is, of course, an idle waste of precious time. Only the sick are, therefore, to be found travelling. I was inveigled in that way by one staying here, who volunteered to go up Pedrotallagalla mountain with me. Taken off my guard, I rashly took him as companion, and thought that I should never have got him to the top. Sinbad's old man of the mountain could not have been a greater encumbrance to him. He afterwards told me that he had had no sleep to speak of for two years. As sleeplessness is the beginning of madness, I was glad that our short acquaintanceship was near its end. Of half-a-dozen that I might have similarly associated with, not one of them was fit for travel, save with a nurse. There are exceptions, of course, but I found by experience what the rule was.

Since leaving Rambodda the journey had been through the tea and cinchona plantations. The coffee has been all left behind now. About Newera Eliya and the neighbouring hills

the tracks of the elephant are often seen. He is considered to be Government property, and a tax of 257. per head is charged by the revenue collector on each one that is exported. The price of one delivered on shipboard is 751. They make nice presents for friends at a distance, so that the information thus detailed may be useful. Sixteen hundred of them have been exported, chiefly to India, in the last five years.

CHAPTER IV.

NEWERA ELIYA TO DONDERA (CEYLON).

NOT a horse is to be got when I am ready to leave Newera Eliya and its coolness, but being happily unencumbered with luggage, I start in the early morning for the walk back to Rambodda. Although I fail to get a horse for this journey, I get something that occupies my thoughts during greater part of it. There is an antiquated maxim about the care to be taken of what we speak, to whom we speak, and where, and how, and when, that would be very objectionable in practice, if possible to carry out. I am sadly reminded of it here, where I go to get the horse for the leaving of this locality. The horse-owner is not within, but his daughter, of womanly age, asks me to wait his early coming, which I do, talking with her meanwhile. She wishes to learn much about Australia, as soon as she catches from my conversation that I have been lately in that quarter. All other places seem suddenly to lose their interest when that land is touched upon. It is well that I know something about it, from the eagerness with which she questions me.

Is it a nice place? she wishes to know, and one where an Englishman would like to settle? That being asked in the year 1876, I feel on the side of truth in answering in the affirmative, and likewise in adding a few adjectives that are superlative on the subject. Is it a better place than Ceylon? and did I think that a young mercantile man going to Melbourne for a holiday would be likely to stop there? I am always as desirous to give information as to get it, and