POINT DE GALLE. 315 
Lordship’s suite; and even the Captain gives up his cabin to 
Lord and Lady Dalhousie. We lie on mattresses on the deck and 
"ts all we can do to turn out tidy for meals in the cabin, for 
breakfast at 9 o’clock, tiffin at noon, dinner at 4, and then we 
spend the evening any way we can. The motion of her powerful 
engine is such that we cannot write without difficulty, and we 
have no private cabin to sit in. 
I have not made many sketches, none indeed since I left Cairo, 
where I made several of and from the Pyramids. At Aden I was far 
too busy botanizing ; though, alas! nearly all my collections have 
been since destroyed by the salt water getting into our wretched 
dormitory on board the “ Moozuffer.” Not only did my Hortus 
Siccus suffer, but my spare paper also; so that in Ceylon I was 
unable to preserve a single thing. This I the less regret, as I 
shall have to take Ceylon on my way to Borneo, when I intend 
spending a week or two with Mr. Gardner at Kandy. 
At Point de Galle we lay in a pretty little cove, surrounded by 
dense forests and wooded hills, the beach fringed with groves of 
Cocoa-nut Palms, and backed by forests of tropical trees of the 
greatest beauty. A more charming spot I never was in, reminding 
me altogether of the scenes described in Paul and Virginia. The 
Cinghalese are a curious people, slender and dark-coloured ; the 
men all wearing long hair, which they gather up and fasten in a 
knot, at the back of the head, supporting the knot, as ladies do in 
England, with a tortoise-shell comb, smearing the whole abundantly 
with Cocoa-nut oil. Their houses are huts thatched with Palm- 
leaves, buried in groves of Cocoa-nuts and Areca or Betel-nut 
Palms, each cottage being overshadowed by the ample foliage of 
the Bread-fruit tree, one of the most luxuriant-looking trees of the 
tropics, thick and umbrageous, with dark green glossy leaves, and 
at all seasons laden with its noble fruit. The Plantain and 
Banana, too, are abundant everywhere, and the Pine-Apple springs 
up by the road-side, bearing excellent fruit, very little inferior to 
that grown in our English stoves. Flowers there are of all kinds, 
from the gaudiest and gayest to the most humble and delicate : 
butterflies, beetles, and gay birds all abound, and all one longs 
2N2 
