12 THE OUT-STATION; OB, 



habitations of the hugest and deadliest of the brute 

 creation, who take no thought of the morrow, what 

 they shall eat or what they shall drink in such a 

 scene, I say, it is strange to recur for a moment to 

 the busy, idle, laughing, weeping, glittering, squalid, 

 hoping, despairing, struggling world of our father- 

 land ! 



" Where is the world at eighty ?" says Young ; 

 where is it at eighteen? he might have asked, stand- 

 ing on the mountain jungle of Ceylon passed from 

 existence, almost from memory ! But " every man 

 his own philosopher" I won't apostrophise. 



As the sun gets higher the signs of life gradually 

 disappear, till the parti-coloured lizards alone seem to 

 have it all to themselves. 



Now and then a brilliant, harmless, snake rustles 

 through the dead grass, and at intervals, a peacock, 

 in all the majesty of a seven-foot tail, stalks out of 

 the skirt of the jungle ; but, by degrees, even these 

 vanish, until nothing is left to disturb the silence of a 

 tropical noonday, the intense stillness of which it is 

 almost painful to endure. 



Such a picture of nature in its primal state, un- 

 ruffled by a breath, unclouded by a haze, admits not 

 of description. 



But it is not always thus. 



Dark, destruction-charged, and terrible, are the hur- 

 ricanes that sweep at times over the scene. Through 

 the deep ravines around, the gusts of wind, like yell- 



