a pole, screaming with pain. Fowls are brought
to market from long distances, hanging by their
feet, and ducks are carried by their heads with
their necks bent to stifle their cries. Worst of
all is the sale by Tamil fishermen's wives, in the
Jaffna market-place, of turtle meat scooped from
the living animal, which lies on its back with
its beating heart bare to the sun and to the
knife which cuts away fins, fat, and pounds of
flesh, usually leaving heart and head to be the
last pieces selected. The heart still beats, and
the mouth snaps, when the shell is nearly emptied
of all its contents.

The swarm of life in Ceylon includes a multitude
of bats, who form one of the features of
the evening landscape. Of many forms and
sizes, they abound in every available cave, gallery,
bungalow roof, or other place of shelter. They
hang to the trees. At sunset, out they fly and
chase the moths, even about the lamps upon the
dinner-table. One bat has a growth like a leaf
at the end of its nose. One glossy black little
bat, not much larger than the bumble-bee, will
alight on the dinner-cloth, and show no great
terror at being caught under a wineglass.

In the depths of the forest, the most formidable
fellow is the bear, who digs for roots, feeds on
the ants, and accounts nothing daintier than
honey. A bear, found by a traveller growling
over his breakfast in the early dawn, was seated
on a lofty branch, thrusting portions of a red
ant's nest into his mouth with one paw, whilst
with the other he endeavoured to clear his
eyebrows and lips of the angry inmates, by whom
he also was bitten. In time of great drought,
bears slip into wells, and, unable to climb back,
frighten away the women who resort to the wells
for water. The bear is, in Ceylon, a solitary and
retiring beast, using his immense strength against
man, only in self-defence; then he endeavours to
fell his assailant by a blow upon the head, and,
when he has him prostrate, makes his attack
first upon the eyes. The bears also attack
fearlessly, the rude dwellings of the Veddahs, for
the honey forming the chief store of these poor
people. The post-office runners, who always
travel by night, carry torches, that the bears
who see them coming may avoid their path.

The only sort of tiger in Ceylon is a leopard,
or cheetah, who is, in fact, the true panther, and
he is much less feared by man than the bear.
There is a variety of him, sometimes met with,
that is not spotted, but altogether black. He
haunts the pasture land in quest of deer and
cattle. There is a belief among the people that
when a leopard has brought to the ground a
bullock, he will not return to feed upon it if it
fall in dying so that the right side is undermost.
The Ceylon leopard is hunted, trapped, or caught
in a cage baited with a kid. He is strongly
attracted by the smell of small-pox. This
disease, as the natives shrink from vaccination,
spreads fearfully among the villages. Rude
temporary small-pox hospitals are made in the
jungle, and to these the leopards are so certainly
allured that special heed of them is necessary.

Of the jackals there is a native superstition
attached to a small horn, called Narri-combo,
which sometimes grows on the head, hidden by
a tuft of hair. Singhalese and Tamils alike hold
this jackal's horn to be a talisman, which
commands for its owner the fulfilment of all wishes,
and which, if lost, invariably finds itself again for
him. On the other hand, the European superstition
concerning the ichneumon, that it uses some
plant as an antidote to the bites of the serpents
upon which it preys, is here rejected.

Then there is the tree rat, with the rat snake
that pursues it; and there is the coffee rat, which
is so much relished by the Malabar coolies that
they prefer working in the plantations it infests.
They eat it fried in oil, or as a curry. Porcupine
is commonly accounted as good for the table as
young pig. The planters find him little to their
taste when living, for he feeds on the young
cocoa-nut palms. They catch him usually in
trenches, baited at the end with his favourite
food, and made so narrow that he cannot turn
in them, while the direction of his quills makes
him unable to back out. The pengolin, or scaly
ant-eater, scoops out the white ants, which are
his food, with powerful claws, rolls himself up
into a ball, secured by a strong fold of his
mail-covered tail, and lives with his one wife in a
burrow seven or eight feet underground. Of a
tame pengolin, kept for some time by Sir Emerson
Tennent, we are told that it "was a gentle
and affectionate creature, which, after wandering
over the house in search of ants, would attract
attention to its wants by climbing up my knee,
laying hold of my leg with its prehensile tail."

There is the buffalo in Ceylon, and there are
the oxen, used for ploughing and for treading
out the corn, as well as for other kinds of labour
in the farm. The wealth of a native proprietor
often consists in the herds of bullocks hired out
to dependents, who already have hired land and
borrowed seed. The cows work with the oxen
and the calves stay by the cows, so there is
seldom milk to be had in a Kandyan village.
Want of proper housing lays the cattle open to
the ravages of murrain, and the murrains are so
devastating as to affect seriously the commercial
welfare of the colony.

In a part of Ceylon where they domesticate
the buffaloes, wild ones occasionally mix with
the tame and annoy the villagers by heading
inconvenient rebellions among them. The birds
frequenting the vast salt marshes and muddy
lakes being used to the sight of the buffalo, this
animal is sometimes trained to assist the sportsman,
and a "sporting buffalo " sells for a
considerable sum.

There is a peculiarity about the buffalo's foot,
to which Sir Emerson Tennent has for the first
time distinctly called attention. It adds to the
sustaining surface, and is equivalent to the
peculiarity by which the foot of the reindeer is
distinguished from that of the stag and the
antelope. In the reindeer, it is usually said that
the exceptional structure is designed to enable
the animal to shovel under the snow in order to
reach the lichens beneath it. Sir Emerson
believes that another use of it has been