Here come two Englishmen in tweed suits and tennis shoes—their umbrellas held carefully by the middle—apparently of the planter community, young, but rather weedy looking, with an unsteady, swimmy look about the eyes which I fear is not uncommon among the planters; I have seen it already well-developed in a mere boy of eighteen.

Here a dozen or so of chetties (a Tamil commercial caste), with bare shaven and half-shaven heads, brown skins, and white muslins thrown gracefully round their full and sleek limbs; the sacred spot marked on their foreheads, red betel in their mouths, and avarice in their faces.

There a Tamil coolie or wage-worker, nearly naked except for a handkerchief tied round his head, with glossy black skin and slight yet graceful figure.

Here a pretty little girl of nine or so, with blue beads round her neck, and the usual white cotton jacket and colored petticoat or çilai of the Cinghalese women, walking with a younger brother.

Here three young Eurasian girls in light European costume and straw hats, hair loose or in pigtails down their backs, very pretty. [They are off for a walk along the Galle Face promenade by the sea, as the heat of the day is now past.]

Here also an English lady, young and carefully dressed, but looking a little bored, driving in her pony-trap to do some shopping, with a black boy standing behind and holding a sunshade over her.

A JINRICKSHAW.

(Tamil cooly, Eurasian girl.)

One of the features of Colombo are the jinrickshaws, or light two-wheeled gigs drawn by men, which abound in the streets. These Tamil fellows, in the lightest of costumes, their backs streaming under the vertical sun, bare-legged and often bare-headed, will trot with you in a miraculous way from one end of Colombo to the other, and for the smallest fee. Tommy Atkins delights to sit thus lordly behind the toiling “nigger.” At eventide you may see him and his Eurasian girl—he in one jinrickshaw and she in another—driving out to the Galle Face Hotel, or some such distant resort along the shore of the many-sounding ocean. The Tamils are mostly slight and graceful in figure, and of an active build. Down at the docks they work by hundreds, with nothing on beyond a narrow band between the thighs, loading and unloading barges and ships—a study of the human figure. Some of them of course are thick and muscular, but mostly they excel in a kind of unconscious grace and fleetness of form as of the bronze Mercury of Herculaneum, of which they often remind me. Their physiognomy corresponds with their bodily activity; the most characteristic type that I have noticed among them has level brows, and eyes deep-set (and sometimes a little close together), straight nose, and well-formed chin. They are a more enterprising pushing and industrious people than the Cinghalese, eager and thin, skins often very dark, with a concentrated, sometimes demonish, look between the eyes—will-power evidently present—but often handsome. Altogether a singular mixture of enterprise with demonic qualities; for occultism is rife among them, from the jugglery of the lower castes to the esoteric philosophy and speculativeness of the higher. The horse-keepers and stable boys in Ceylon are almost all Tamils (of a low caste), and are a charming race, dusky active affectionate demons, fond of their horses, and with unlimited capacity of running, even over newly macadamised roads. The tea-coolies are also Tamils, and the road-workers, and generally all wage-laborers; while the Cinghalese, who have been longer located in the island, keep to their own little peasant holdings and are not at all inclined to come under the thumb of a master, preferring often indeed to suffer a chronic starvation instead.