Ballou Maturin Murray - Foot-prints of Travel: or, Journeyings in Many Lands стр 14.

Ceylon lies just off the southern point of India; and though it is a British colony, its government is quite distinct from that of the mainland. It forms a station for a large number of troops, and is about three times the size of Massachusetts.

Many of the native women are employed by the large number of English families resident here, especially by officers' wives, as nurses. These last seem to form a class by themselves, and they dress in the most peculiar manner, as we see the children's nurses dressed in Rome, Paris, and Madrid. The Singhalese nurses wear a single white linen garment covering the body to the knees, very low in the neck, with a blue cut-away velvet jacket covered with silver braid and buttons and open in front, a scarlet silk sash gathering the under-garment at the waist. The legs and feet are bare, the ankles covered with bangles, or ornamental rings, and the ears heavily weighed down and deformed with rings of silver and gold.

The vegetation of Ceylon is what might be expected of an island within so few miles of the equator; that is, beautiful and prolific in the extreme. The cinnamon fields are so thrifty as to form a wilderness of green, though the bushes grow but four or five feet in height. The cinnamon bush, which is a native here, is a species of laurel, and bears a white, scentless flower, scarcely as large as a pea. The spice of commerce is produced from the inner bark of the shrub, the branches of which are cut and peeled twice annually. The plantations resemble a thick, tangled undergrowth of wood, without any regularity, and are not cultivated after being properly started. Ceylon was at one time a great producer of coffee, and still exports the berry, but a disease which attacked the leaves of the shrub has nearly discouraged the planters. Among the wild animals are elephants, deer, monkeys, bears, and panthers fine specimens of which are preserved in the excellent museum at Colombo. Pearl oysters are found on the coast, and some magnificent pearls are sent to Paris and London.

The bread-fruit tree is especially interesting, with its feathery leaves, and its melon-shaped fruit, weighing from three to four pounds. This, the natives prepare in many ways for eating, and as the tree bears fruit continually for nine months of the year, it forms a most important food-supply. Two or three trees will afford nourishment for a hearty man, and half a dozen well cared for will sustain a small family, a portion of the fruit being dried and kept for the non-producing months. Banana groves, and orchards bending under the weight of the rich, nutritious fruit, tall cocoanut-trees with half a ton of ripening nuts in each tufted top, ant-hills nearly as high

as native houses, rippling cascades, small rivers winding through the green valleys, and flowers of every hue and shape, together with birds such as one sees preserved in northern museums, all these crowd upon our vision as we wander about inland.

Ceylon is rich in prehistoric monuments, showing that there once existed here a great and powerful empire, and leading us to wonder what could have swept a population of millions from the face of the globe and have left no clearer record of their past. The carved pillars, skilfully wrought, now scattered through the forest, and often overgrown by mammoth trees, attest both material greatness and far-reaching antiquity. It would seem as though nature had tried to cover up the wrinkles of age with blooming and thrifty vegetation.

We embark at Colombo for Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, steering a course south by east through the Indian Ocean for a distance of about thirty-five hundred miles. On this voyage we find the nights so bright and charming that hours together are passed upon the open deck studying the stars. Less than two thousand can be counted from a ship's deck by the naked eye, but with an opera-glass or telescope the number can be greatly increased. Among the most interesting constellations of the region through which we are now passing, is the Southern Cross. For those not familiar with its location, a good way to find the Cross is to remember that there are two prominent stars in the group known as Centaurus that point directly towards it. That farthest from the Cross is regarded as one of the fixed stars nearest to the earth, but its distance from us is twenty thousand times that of the sun. Stellar distances can be realized only by familiar comparison. For instance: were it possible for a person to journey to the sun in a single day, basing the calculation upon a corresponding degree of speed, it would require fifty-five years to reach this fixed star! Probably not one-half of those who have sailed beneath its tranquil beauty are aware that near the upper middle of the cross there is a brilliant cluster of stars which, though not visible to the naked eye, are brought into view with the telescope. In these far southern waters we also see what are called the Magellanic Clouds, which lie between Canopus and the South Pole. These light clouds, or what seem to be such, seen in a clear sky, are, like the "Milky Way," visible nebulæ, or star-clusters, at such vast distance from the earth as to have by combination this effect upon our vision.