is wallet to buy his daily food
will invest them in a small number of oyster-shells, hoping to find a
pearl of great value; and, should he fail to do so, he contents
himself with eating the oyster and hoping for better luck next time.
The shells are generally left on the sand in carefully guarded heaps
till they die and open, when the pearls are extracted, and the fish
left to decay. Some of the oysters are taken in sealed-up sacks to
Colombo, Kandy, and other inland places, in order to enable people to
indulge their love of gambling and speculation, without the trouble of
a journey to Manaar. Though called oysters, they are not the proper
oyster, but a sort of avicula (_Meleagrina margaritifera_ being the
name given by Samarik), very different from the large mother-of-pearl
shells in which the South Sea pearls are found.

I have not been able to keep my mind from running incessantly on Sir
Emerson Tennent's delightful book on Ceylon, which describes places we
have not ourselves visited, but which I wanted very much to see, and I
have been so interested reading about them that I cannot help thinking
other people will share my feelings. It seems wonderful that so much
which is strange, beautiful, and interesting should be so easy of
access from England, and yet that so few English travellers know
comparatively anything of Ceylon, except Galle and Colombo, and
perhaps Kandy and Trincomalee.

_Saturday, April 7th_.--To-day we passed close to the island of
Minnikoy, between the groups of islands called the Laccadives and
Maldives, some of which we saw dotting the horizon; and still further
to the south stretches the Chagos Archipelago. It was very hot all
day, with hardly a breath of air, and we have all returned to our
former light and airy costumes: the gentlemen to their shirts and
trousers, the children to their pinafores and nothing else, and I to
my beloved Tahitian dresses.

Before we left England we could not make ourselves believe what we
were told about heat in the tropics; so we started with very few
windsails and without any punkahs or double awnings. It was all very
well in the Atlantic or Pacific, but between Hongkong and Singapore
the state of things became simply unbearable. The carpenter has rigged
up a punkah, and the men have improvised some double awnings. At
Colombo they made some windsails, so we are now better off than on our
last hot voyage. It has been really hotter than ever to-day, but a
pleas