o4 MONTHLY. t>o 
Vol, XIX. 
COLOMBO, MAY 1st, 1900. 
No. 11. 
"PIONEERS OF THE PLANTING ENTERPRISE IN CEYLON." 
{Ihircl Series.) 
ARTHUR SINCLAIR, f.l.s,^ f.r.c.i., 
PLANTER AND VISITING AGENT IN CEYLON. 
[the story of his life and times as told by himself.] 
N a snug, little farm-house at 
Kino; fidward, Abeideensliire, 
I was born one dreigh day in 
December, 1832. My earliest 
recollection is a ploughing' 
match, or "love darg," by the 
neighbours on the occasion of 
my father retiring to Turriff, 
an adjacent township : 
" A wee bit placie nestlin' doou 
Wi' bums and hills and wide aroon ; 
It's hardly what you'd ca' a toon, 
Oor native Turra. 
But little placie tbo' it be. 
It's dear to many mair than me. 
And prood are we to say that we 
Were born and bred near Turra." 
SCHOOLS. 
Here I was sent to school at the age of live. 
Albeit letters were not of the first importance at 
Mrs. Crniekshank's establishment, knitting was her 
forte, and she insisted upon all her pupils of both 
sexes being proficient in this art, a technical educa- 
tion which has not as yet proved eminently useful 
to me, but who knows? The day may come, as it did 
to Robt. Knox, to whom the knitting and hawking 
of caps led to the opportunity of his escaping from 
Ceylon, 
I graduated in niy seventh year and entered the 
Parish-school, then ably conducted by the Revi 
John Clark; and here I soon took a fairly good posi= 
tion. At the end of my third year I got to the front, 
or "McCuUoch class" next to the village lad of 
pairts— 'gas Johnie' who by the way still survives 
as the Rev. Dr. Duncan, the esteemed minister o' 
Trinity Congregational Church, Aberdeen. In my 
tenth year my school education virtually ended, un- 
toward circumstances followed, which henceforth de- 
prived me of the dominie's aid, my father removing 
again to a bleak country district, wliere the school 
and schoolmaster belonged to a type so poor and 
primitive as to be quite a revelation to the 
\:llage-bred boy who found nothing in common 
with the "heather peepers of Blacklaw." Two 
things went very much against my grain, tiie one 
was the carrying of a peat daily to school, and the 
other was the committing to memory of that 
profound document said to have been compiled 
"for those of weaker capacity," though to this 
day, I am bound to confess it is beyond mine. My 
parents were descended from an old Jacobite stock, 
at this time still rather at a discount, and although 
they would have offered no objections ta my learn- 
ing the Shorter Catechism, they would not" enforce 
it. So left to the freedom of my own will, I decided 
to have none of it. In Turriff school I had been 
