CEYLON COCOA ESTATE 255 



" Shropshire." Very loth was I to leave this 

 beautiful country, and can imagine no more 

 ideal home in which to settle, and no more 

 interesting occupation than that of a planter, 

 for those who find England too expensive and 

 too overcrowded, and who have the necessary 

 taste for out-door life. An income that would 

 be decidedly narrow and inadequate at home 

 would in Ceylon, when added to a planter's 

 salary, provide all the comforts and many of 

 the luxuries of life. A small patrimony (say five 

 thousand pounds and upwards) well invested, 

 added to good, steady, hard work, would pro- 

 bably, in time, enable a man to retire with a 

 comfortable competency, but I cannot help 

 saying that, in my opinion, Ceylon is no place 

 for penniless men, unless, indeed, they have 

 been brought up in unusually frugal homes, 

 and are endowed with remarkably robust con- 

 stitutions. Salaries have been cut down to 

 the lowest sums at which it is possible to live 

 and keep in health. If, by great self-denial, 

 the young planter succeeds in keeping out of 

 debt, he will find it to be the utmost he can do, 

 and that no margin will remain for the pro- 

 verbial "rainy day." Nothing for illness or 

 periods of non-employment, misfortunes which 

 may befall him through no fault of his own. 

 The thriftless and idle, and unsteady, go to the 

 dogs a little more quickly here than they would 



