The Daily Morning Journal And Courier

Things Seen on the Way and After You Get There.

In the railroad journey out of Colombo, from the region of interminable plantations of cocoa palms, one mounts past stations of astonishing names, gaining in altitude as he gains proficiency in putting the interminable Cingalese syllables together. There can be no complaint made that the British rulers have disregarded the native place names. One almost wishes they had, when he struggles to remember in order such arrays of syllables as Heneratgoda, Polgahawela and Rambukkana, and notes with admiration how they trip from the tongue of any foreign resident.

At Rambukkana peddlers ran up and down the platform with trays of fruit, bread, cakes and drinkables, while a delightful black person, with a bunch of golden cocoanuts in one hand and a strong chopping knife in the other, roamed up and down offering the real drink of the country for five rupee cents the unbroken package. It was admirable, the deftness and sureness with which, with a few strokes of his knife, he cut to the kernel, chipped out a bunghole and handed it to the thirsty customer, who tipped it to his mouth and refreshed himself internally, and externally also. A pint of cool cocoanut milk went down his throat by gulps, little rills ran back to his ears, and slipped over his brown body, and then he emptied another cocoanut, and took a third one into the train to sustain him for the remaining thirty thirty miles of travel.

A second engine was put to the train at Rambukkana, and quickly the train began mounting along the shoulders of hills and darting through tunnels, until rice fields, in their checkered outlines and rippling terraces, dropped away and below, and mountain shapes and further blue hills appeared on the horizon. The air came fresher, as it came unchecked from further space, and cocoa palms tossed and thrashed their glittering fronds far beneath us.

Yet, still the train mounted, and one looked down sheer precipices for hundreds of feet, to valleys yellow with rice stubble, and one seemed to look out for hundreds of miles to the forested slopes of far mountains green to their sky lines. In thirteen miles the railway conquered the fourteen hundred more feet of ascent, and at Kadugannawa we breathed a fresh, invigorating air 1,699 feet above sea level. A quick run down to one station and up hill again to Kandy, and we were at the mountain capital, the holiday spot and playground of Ceylon, one of the most attractive places in all the tropics.

Under the green trees, in the clear sparkling air of the uplands, the white and bright colors of the natives' dress seemed to add more picturesqueness than ever to the scene, and one could unceasingly congratulate himself on coming to Ceylon when it was flooded in sunshine instead of in the streaming rains and dense mists that blurred its beauty a bit when I saw it years ago.

The heart of Kandy is an artificial lake filling the long oval hollow between high hills. The lake was converted from paddy fields originally, enlarged by the Kandyan kings, but further enlarged, surrounded by an ornamental wall, and planted round with trees by a British governor. As royal palms, flame trees, tamarinds, and bo trees have grown, the beauties of the place have increased, and the drive and out-walk around the lake is the promenade of all Kandy.

The famous temple of the Tooth and the old palaces, now converted to government offices, are on one side of the lake, and directly opposite is the monastery, one of the oldest in Ceylon. Between the temple and the monastery there is a constant passing to and fro of yellow robed priests, some with black, some with white, and once one with a yellow umbrella, which precisely completed the picturesque scene.

Villas surround the little lake: there are fine tennis courts in a grove of flame trees at the upper end, and the British residents of Kandy are much to be envied by all the world. Arcadia and Paradise are terms freely applied to Kandy, and for years it has been in my memory one of the ideal, surely to be revisited garden spots of earth.

Beyond the famous temple, away from the lake, the governor of Ceylon has a white palace, known as the Pavilion, and if ever there were a lovely spot in the world it is there. The Persian poem inlaid on the walls of the old palace at Delhi could as well be written in Kandy, for, "If on earth be an Eden of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this."

The gardens and grounds surrounding the Pavilion have had seventy years of careful attention, and the climate has done the rest. The palms are superb, the tamarinds are magnificent, and there are two enormous cotton trees on the lawn, now stripped of their foliage and dropping their last big, blood red flowers, that are monarchs among their colossal kind.

There are several amherstias in the grounds, and of all blossoming trees, that namesake of Lord Amherst is surely the most uniquely beautiful. From a distance the amherstia might be a maple, or almost any common compact, deciduous tree, but from every branch and twig there depend loose, shower bouquet bunches of large, coral red petals, relieved with a touch of deep yellow at the tip, and loose raying stamens and pistils. The great, loose blossoms sway in the wind, a wistaria blossom shortened but magnified twenty times, and the vivid, deep coral tones against the fresh foliage hold the eye with amazed fascination. Here and there about Kandy one sees other amheristias gay with their beautiful, rich, red blossoms, and the wonder of it never palls.

There are many small and less fa-