hen brought face to face with the matter says manfully that he
will never descend to employing a fellow creature to run between shafts
like an animal, that he (visitor from a land where rights of mankind
are equal and constitutional) may be spared from footweariness under a
tropic sun. It is a noble impulse--but weak man is easily tempted.
Hence, you decide to try the 'rickshaw just once.

The sensation is found to be agreeable, surprisingly so. Your fellow
mortal, you perceive, is dripping with perspiration under the awful heat
of the sun, while beneath the hood of the vehicle you are cool and
comfortable. Then you yield to the savage defects of your moral
make-up--and decide never to walk another yard in the East, not when a
'rickshaw is to be had. The habit comes as easily as drinking, or
anything that your conscience and bringing-up tell you is not quite
right, although enjoyable.

The 'rickshaw in Colombo is a splendid convenience. The runner's rights
are as loyally protected as those of his employer, and he readily covers
six miles an hour at a swinging gait. If his vehicle has rubber tires
and ball-bearings the labor is not severe. The man might have a harder
vocation with smaller pay.

Colombo has hotels that would satisfy in Europe or America--one, the
Grand Oriental, is spoken of as the most comfortable hostelry between
Cairo and San Francisco. To refer to it by its full name stamps the
newcomer and novice at traveling--throughout half the world it is known
familiarly as the "G. O. H." Two miles from Colombo, gloriously situated
on the sea-front, the Galle Face Hotel is fashionable, cool and quiet,
but lacking in the characteristic of being an international
casino--which assuredly the "G. O. H." is. Tiffin or dinner is an
interesting function at a Colombo hotel, for one never knows who or what
his table mates may be. In the East every man who travels is assumed to
be somebody. Hence you suspect your _vis-a-vis_ at dinner to be the
governor of a colony somewhere in the immeasurable Orient, or a new
commander for Saigon, or perhaps a Frankfort banker going to China to
conclude the terms of a new loan. If your neighbor at table is specially
reserved, and gives his orders like one accustomed to being obeyed, you
fancy him to be an accomplished diplomatist, very likely having in his
pocket the draft of a treaty affecting half the people of the Far East.
No one seems ever to suspect his confreres of being mere bus