SEA-SERPENTS AND SEA-SNAKES.

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to sea-snakes there can be no discussion, for every seaman in those seas, and especially in the gulf nearer to the coast off Bombay, has seen them in myriads. Sometimes men have died from their bites. The tract is called the snake-ground. Now, if there be sea-snakes twelve and fourteen feet long, why may there not be sea-serpents eighty or a hundred feet long? Professor Owen says there can't. Peter McQuhae, Esq., Captain, Royal Navy, magna comitante caterva, says there is at least one-for he saw it. Professor Owen shakes his head, but he cannot shake away the sea-snakes. In the Isle of Lewis there is a most respectable lady, whose assurance that she herself saw the sea-serpent swimming about in the Bay of Greiss, and scratching his head against the rocks on an island in the centre of it, can be corroborated by dozens of living people. But science, incredulous, evidently will never be satisfied till it has a body to dissect. Shoals of skipjacks are tumbling and leaping out of the water in great spirits near us, and more than twice to-day a shark showed his fin like a black cocked hat moving rapidly above. the surface of the oily roll of the sea. The skipjacks are great, fine fellows, seven or eight feet long, as well as I can guess, rising like blocks of silver twice their length into the air, and falling with a thundering splash back again. Look out eagerly for a native boat of the Laccadive or Maldive people, but see none. Our captain says these curious and interesting groups of islands are constructed of coral. raised round the edge of submarine mountains. The inhabitants are mild, amiable, and industrious, civil to strangers, but obstinate in refusing to allow them to

settle. They make their own boats, ships, and compasses, and seem to enjoy a very happy civilisation, which "destiny" will compel some one to disturb some fine day.

January 19th.-A hot day at sea-nearing the tropics. The punkahs only fan oven-like puffs of air to and fro.

January 20th.-Early this morning high blue peaks appeared rising out of the sea on our port bow. Extraordinary boats with huge lateen sails skimmed over the sea with wonderful speed. By degrees the blue peaks grow higher, and grander, and more distinct; the island swells out of the water, till, as we advance, it spreads right across the horizon, and shows us a fringing grove of cocoa-trees, against whose stems the waves break, shutting up a wild sea of exotic vegetation.

A strip of bright yellow sand, on which the sea breaks among the cocoa-trees, is dotted here and there with boats. Inside the belt of trees there are, we are told, snakes and elephants beyond computation. Galle is in the distance, the entrance marked by a solitary cocoa-tree on an island. It was dusk when we anchored in the harbour.

CHAPTER VI.

Point de Galle.-Lorette's Hotel.-O'Dwyer, the waiter.-A slice of old Europe.-Old friends and old times.--Cricket, with thermometer at 98°.-Real tropical vegetation.-Departure from Ceylon.-Native habit of hoarding. Our ignorance of Indian social life.-Approaching the land. The pilot, and his letterbag. Startling news.-Corporal Brown.-India safer than Ireland.

January 21st.-Last night we went on shore-a lot of us. I can only recollect a pier shooting out from under an old wall crested with trees, a baronial gateway, a walk up a dark avenue fringed with trees, and the appearance of a dim little street, very clean and quiet, and lighted principally by fire-flies, in which was the Mansion House Hotel. But, alas! it was full of people for and from China, Malacca, Australia, the Spice Islands, and such strange places, that we could not think of intruding upon them. And so we went to Lorette's Hotel, and there we were permitted to lie on sofas in the verandah, as an auto da fé on the part of Lorette to the mosquitoes. I woke up this morning from horrid slumbers, in which I dreamed I was Regulus, and Curtius, and Saint-who is it that is pierced by arrows?-and found my face and hands like portions of ill-baked plum-pudding. Lorette declared it was wholesome-" Sine of the gude blode." I yielded with reluctance to the evidences of my excellent circulating medium, and sat down to breakfast, which was only remarkable for its marked contrasts to most good meals of that sort. Are there

not coffee-planters in Ceylon, and is not Mocha round the next corner? Yes! Try to get an oyster at Colchester, or a lobster at Dalkey, and you will find that there is no such place to meet with poverty as at the edge of a gold-mine. But if we had no coffee worth drinking, and if the eggs showed a great deficiency in the powers of the active galline which gave the place its name, we had abundance of physical exertions on the part of the inhabitants to show they were worthy of our support. Tall men, endued in large bedcurtains from neck to heel, with raven tresses fastened on the back of the head by large tortoiseshell combs, offered-nay, pressed upon us-every variety of article for which we could have no use. Umbrellas from China, made of paper and bamboo, price one shilling; slippers of very cutting hard fibre, ebony sticks, canes of cinnamon, jasmin, and orange, boxes of porcupine quills, Bombay inlaid cases for cigars and ladies' work, and cards made of carved sandal wood, elephants of ebony for paper weights, ornaments of elephants' tusks, collections of diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, cats' eyes, opals, which you might buy cheaply, and yet find not worth the money. In effect, Galle is the metropolis of false stones. The trade of deception is carried to perfection. One man had a cat's eye for which he would not take less, he said, than 5007. He had another for which he wanted 20 rupees, or 21. He changed his hands and I could not tell the difference. After a hard bargain one of my comrades abated the price of a gorgeous ring from 157. to 35s. A neighbouring jeweller offered him the counterpart for 12s. "This real stone, other real glass." But let us get out into the clear air-into the town,

A SLICE OF OLD EUROPE.

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which is an odd little reminiscence of Leyden mixed with Bröck. The mad waiter at Lorette's, whose name was O'Dwyer, and who boasted that "he had been in wid a grey dele of fitein' all over the world, and had seen a grey dele of fun," came down to show us the antiquities, but we thought his antecedents might induce him to introduce us to old drinks and new squabbles, and declined his assistance, whereupon Mr. O'D. observed, "Now, mind! If yez come to harrum, don't blame me. Knock any of 'em down that torments yez,” and retired. Admirable philosopher! Had your advice been followed, we should have formed a temporary pavement in Galle of the bodies of prostrate Cingalese. No! we walked down clean, sandy streets, which bore marks of Mynheer even yet, between rows of large one-storied, high-roofed, spacious houses, with a continuous line of porticoes in front, the doorways and windows open, but fenced from the gaze of the public by nice mantlets of fine horizontal matting. Vendors of curios marked us for their own, but invincible silence and hard umbrella points at last mastered the auri sacra fames. Galle, I should have said, is the oddest place in the world. Here is a slice of old Europe, 200 years old, thrust in among cocoanut trees, palms, coral reefs, a blue tropical sky and sea-men who dress like women and women who look like men, with its queer gables, high roofs, abstruse ramparts, odd gateways and houses, which England has appropriated without in any way affecting the aspect of either the old or the new inhabitants. Jan Wyck sells groceries and spices to Frouw Winkel, and Bruggems acts as notarius, and old Jonghmans, the opticus et mechanicus,

VOL. I.

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