On the Indian Hills

ON the following morning I was awakened by W---, who occupied the next room to mine, putting his head and shoulders over the partition which divided the rooms, and saying he had received orders last night from the Colombo agents of his company to proceed forthwith to the scene of his future labors, somewhere about forty miles to the north-west of Kandy, in the center of the island, and was going to start by the first train. If I wanted to see the ancient capital of the island, now was my chance. After a moment's consideration his proposition was accepted, and a few minutes afterwards we were both seated in the dewan-khana, hard at work on coffee and eggs -- very small ones these, by the way, four or five only making up the substance of one English egg -- and then, getting through our chota hazri, we started off for the railway station.

When we reached the summit of a little eminence, from which a good view of the town and harbor was to be obtained, we both turned at once to take a last look at the Almora, but we looked in vain. There lay the green-and-white Dutchmen, and the Government frigate, and a score of other ships, but our vessel's berth was empty, and nothing left of her save a faint line of smoke on the southern horizon. We both felt that our last tie with England was gone, and, after watching the receding smoke for a few minutes, we smothered our feelings by setting off at a great pace for the station again. We took second-class tickets to Kandy, and got into what was labeled a second-class compartment, but in point of comfort it might have been a fourth or fifth class. It was open right through, with the hardest of hard wooden seats. We made a start about half-past seven, and at first the line ran through deep groves of palm trees and scattered native huts, in front of the doors of which there were always a collection of little brown children, dogs, and chickens, all living on terms of perfect equality, and apparently both very happy and very dirty. Beyond the palm groves, which only fringe the seacoast, the country became more open, and I saw rice growing again for the first time since I was a very small chokra and was out in India -- about the time of the Mutiny.

The rice is called paddy by the natives, and the English, adopting the word, call the places in which it is grown paddy-swamps; and they are real swamps. There are no hedges such as make the country so diverse and interesting in England, but each field is separated from the adjoining field by a high mud bank, broad at the base and two or three feet wide at the top, which is from four to six feet above the level of the surrounding land. When the young rice is planted, the water is turned into the enclosure from some neighboring stream or canal, and ploughed backwards and forwards by native ploughs drawn by white bullocks. The result is a fearful "Slough of Despond," the whole field becoming one sea of liquid mud, but that is the condition which the grain likes best. As we passed over the level country in the train, the young plants were just shooting above the soil in armies of tender green blades, and the recent rains having freshened things up a great deal, there seemed every prospect of a good harvest and an end of the famine. In some fields the rice had been sown earlier, and was a foot or more high, and here the paddy-birds -- a very graceful species of white heron -- seemed to be enjoying themselves along with two varieties of plovers.

After some fifteen or twenty miles of these paddy-swamps and scattered palm-groves, we approached the foot of the great inland mountains, and began to mount rapidly, the scenery and surroundings changing with every mile of our way, until we had left the lowlands and palm trees far below, and were climbing up amongst mountain valleys and gullies clad with thick forests of jack, fig, and many other trees. Every now and then we crossed a foaming mountain torrent by a light iron bridge, probably forged in Birmingham and brought out here piece by piece, or we rattled through dark tunnels pierced through the hearts of mountains too rough or too steep to be climbed.