Jan. 1, 1902.] 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
461 
of Madulsima and a place we knew well in the 
days of Daddy Hamilton, the then Suparinlendent. 
We well renjemlier. 
DAODY HAMILTON, 
the keen sportsman, keeping up with his dog 
round some of the steep parts of Forest Hill 
and on one occasion the writer got stuck on a 
slali rock very s ippery, unable to move up or 
down, and Hamilton came to the rescue just as 
it was getting <iark, and we were slad to take 
his hand c.nd be put on an old path. The I tst 
time we met v/as in Montserrat, on the 
Montserrat Lime Juice Company's estate, where 
Daddy was Manager and we went out to 
him to doctor the lime tre^s. Since then 1 
believe Montserrat has been deva>ted by 
hurricanes. The inhabitants of Montserrat are 
Iri>h Niggers, they are very black, but talk 
wiih an Iri-h accent and rejoice in the names 
of Bourke, O' Bryan, U'l'' inn agin, Irish, &c. 
Some of I hem are well ofl", owning large sugar 
plantations. The Island is small, between St. 
Kitts Nevis (where Nelson married the widow) 
and AutigiiN Hie seat of Government for the 
Leeward Islands. I went there in an open boat 
sailing past Guadeloupe, Martinique and Dominica 
from Trinidad. Perhaps Daddy Hamilton, orce 
a great favourite in the district of Madulsima, 
will return to Ceylon and cultivate tea instead 
of lime juice. He was one of the Superintendents 
of the late K. B. Downall, who liked him none 
the less for being a good sportsman. I must bring 
this letter to a close and visit Coeagalla, Koebeiry 
and Uva, a description of which will be given in my 
next. It is rather a rough journey and the weather 
is liad ;>tter mid-day ; it is raining hard now. 
Leaving my hospitable host. Mi. Ryall of 
Battawatie, a little above his tea factory, thereby 
saving a tremendous long trudge round tlie cart 
road through Forest Hill and a long swoop in 
the direction of Wevebedde or Tavellum|dnssie, 
down to Dunedin, we simply joined the zig zag 
approaching the factory from the bridle patii. 
To our minds tiiis seemed to be the ugliest 
piece of the Madulsima cart-road, yet the object 
is obvious, being to pull up at the C'oeagalla tea 
factory on the old and compact little es ate 
known to coffee planting days as " Dunedin," now 
expunged from your Directory and amalgamated 
with the Oocjgalla Gioup, formerly named the 
" Madulsima Coffee and Cinchona Company, Ltd." 
We have a faint recollection that Cocngalla 
once belonged to Lord Lawrence, the Viceroy 
of India, before the Company was formed. 
We remember George Osborne as Superintend- 
ent of Cocitgalla twenty years ago and tlie pride 
he took in bis crack cinclionn fields. There are 
still signs of them remaining on steep slopes 
now out of cultivation, suckers of cinchona 
succirnbra and hardy hybrids, growing from the 
twenty-year-old stumps amongst the mana-grass 
and cliena growth &,bove and below the roads. 
Queen tea is nosv supreme and little Dunedin 
possesses a hundred acres of a very fine jat and 
very healthy in appearance, some leaves as large 
as a man's hand and of good colour as well 
as strongly embossed. It is a very stiff pull up 
from the Coeagalla Tea Factory at Dunedin to 
tlie Coeagalla bungalow. Tliere are some Jacob's 
ladders in the foru) of stone steps, but we pre- 
ferred the bridle-path though exposed to the heat 
of a yery hot sun. Of course, the tea is well 
shaded by grevilleas and other timber trees and 
is naturally more pleasant walking than the 
zig-zag paths on the exposed patana or mana-- 
grass fields. As we neared the bungalow, there 
is another high class or good jat field 
of Assani-Hybiid tea looking remarkably healthy 
and promising good finslips since the North-East 
monsoon broke on the Uva ranges with thunder- 
storms and refre-^hiiig showers of rain generally 
falliiig in the afternoon and evening not much 
interfering with estate work. My old friend 
Mason gave me a letter of introduction (which 
I asked for) to Mr Williams ; the letter to Mr 
•John Williams ^introduced me to Mr Williams, 
jnr., now on 
COCAGALL.-V 
and I was made very comfortable for the 
rest of the day. It is the same <dd 
bungalow, on an excellent site, command- 
ing a crand view of the estates around and 
the bright gieen patanas. The green tea leaf is 
shot down to the Factory by wiie-shoots five in 
number, branching i ff from difFeientst ations ; the 
bulk of the leaf travels by two very 1 ong ^hoots 
with patent rollers. It is very interesting to 
watch the bags swinging through the air at the 
rate of a mile a minute and coming down with 
a bump into each station and finally into the 
grand depot or factory, withering house, built 
tor its daily reception, where it is immediately 
spread out thin on the tats, a pound of green- 
leaf covering about six square feet of jute- 
hessian. 
I did not enter the factory in the absence of 
some one to take me round. The fact of the master 
is tea factories are all very much alike and I don't 
see why I should give the manufacturers of 
rolling maeliines, siroccos, steam engines sifting 
machines, &c., &e, a free ailvertisement every time. 
I vvell remember taking a lot of trouble to adver- 
tise the tea roUtr when first invented in 1876 in 
As.~am and received some very fine photographs of 
a new roller fiom the inventor, in Assam (then 
on a visit). I went so far as to send them to the 
Secretary of the Planters' Association of Ceylon 
and they were duly acknowledged by a special 
vo"'e of thanks to your correspondent on his return 
to Ceylon, but within a few weeks from this time 
the inventor turned up to make a tour round the 
tea districts and to book orders. I met him in a 
bungalow somewhere, I forget where, and claimed 
his acquaintance, but he pretended to forget me, 
saying " I only saw you for five minutes." 
The energetic superintendents of Coeagalla 
Group are making plenty of tea. The acreage of 
Coeagalla is one thousand one hundred and four 
with over six hundred acres of tea in bearing : 
added to this is Hewa Eliya and Elemane with 
another four hnndi ed acres of tea, making a large 
charge of one thousand aci es of tea in cultivation. 
We spent a very pleasant evening with Mr W A 
Williams and discussed many subjects of mutual 
interest. Next morning we rose early and with 
our mountain staff climbed to the top of Coea- 
galla estate and passing over the gap descended 
into Hewa Eli.ya. 
With the exception of Hewa Eliya and 
Elemane estates, now under tea cultivation, all the 
old coffee properties between Coeagalla and Koe- 
berry are out of cultivation. We rememl>er many 
of them including Mousa and Kosgahadova, 
Quedgeley, Rathkele, and others, including some 
