If he continue to give satisfaction and prove
himself a good planter, he may, after a while, be
entrusted with the general supervision of two or
three estates in his neighbourhood, and draw
five hundred pounds, or six hundred pounds a
year in actual salaries; and he may be consulted
with regard to the quality of forest lands, and their
adaptability for cultivation; and he may be looked
up to in his district as a man of some weight.
There is, perhaps, no sphere in which a man
takes his position so completely by virtue of his
intrinsic qualities, as in that of a planter. There
are about five hundred of these men, or more,
scattered throughout the central province, and
they come from every class, and from every part
of Great Britain, though Scotchmen are the
most numerous. There are men among them
from Cambridge and Oxford, and men from the
plough, or the ranks of the army. There are men
of known integrity, sobriety, and steadiness, and
there are men who are just the opposite; but a
man goes for what he is, and what he is worth, and
not for what he has been, or pretends to be, and
he soon finds his right place, or is placed in it.
Let a dozen planters meet at a "rest-house," and
before sitting down to dinner they will call
upon one of their number to take the head of
the table. The selection is made with regard to
the recognised station of the individual as a
planter and a man, and the man who has the
greatest weight of character, not the most
flourishing antecedents, takes the post of honour.

When our planter has attained the position I
have mentioned, he will be able to lay by
enough out of his earnings to invest in a small
estate of his own. He may perhaps purchase
a few hundred acres of forest which he has
judiciously selected, and clear it, and cultivate it by
degrees; perhaps he may borrow a little money
to go on with it faster, and so in time he
becomes a proprietor. Perhaps he gets a good
offer for his little estate, which by virtue of his
good management is a promising one, and he
goes to a new district and opens estates for
himself and others, and becomes the leading
manager, and is in a position to revisit for
a year or two his native land, and bring out a
little wife, or a big wife, as the case may be.

This is a view of coffee planting in its favourable
aspect. It assumes that my man has the
qualities needed in a good planter. That he is
willing to lead an isolated life, or at least a life
from which the society of his countrywomen is
excluded, for there are very few ladies in the
coffee districts compared with the number of the
opposite sex. He will, if sociable, see his
neighbours, and be seen of them, for the hospitality
of planters is proverbial, and periodically he has
to visit Kandy, or some other inland town, to
draw specie for the payment of his coolies, and
there he will meet a dozen or more of his
companions who have come on the same errand, and
they will have a crack after dinner, on the
district news, labour, coffee-bags, crops, the railway,
the state of the roads, the last hit at the
government by the Planters' Association, that
letter of B. W. in the Observer, &c. &c. On
the estate the planter has enough to do; a walk
or a ride of ten or twelve miles before eleven
o'clock, will give him a hearty appetite for his
late breakfast, after having been soaked by a
dozen showers, and dried again by a dozen suns;
in the evening a pipe by the fireside, and a
chat with some friend who has ridden over, will
while away the time. If of steady principle
and right feeling, he may avoid those temptations
which are incidental to the life he has to lead,
and which many do not escape; he will generally
find a place of worship and a preacher within
ten or twelve miles of where he lives, if not
every Sunday, at least once a month.

If, however, he have not energy and strength
of character as well as of body—if he readily
succumb to difficulty, and yield weakly to
temptation, I warn him off; let him not
hereafter come to me, enfeebled by dissipation, and
say I told him to go to Ceylon. With the
qualities I have named as requisite, there are, I
may say, few men who do not in time get on,
though I am far from saying that all will
eventually become proprietors, or be able to marry—
for to reach that consummation so devoutly to
be wished, the expense of a voyage to England
must be incurred, the matrimonial market in
Ceylon being anything but overstocked; but
most men may make themselves comfortable,
and lay by something for a rainy day, if
industrious and steady. On the other hand, many
men who have come out with capital have
invested it hastily and injudiciously in some
unremunerative property, or have spent their
time in peacocking in Colombo, or elephant
shooting in Bintenne, and left the estate to
take such care of itself as estates generally do
under the circumstances, and the consequences
are what might have been expected.

As to the merchant's office, integrity, energy,
and rectitude, will stand much in a young man's
favour. He will unquestionably prosper. His
life will be spent in the larger towns, and in
course of time he may be admitted into a share
in his employer's firm.

Cocoa-nut planters may, perhaps, complain
that I have said nothing about them. Well; if
you like to put a cocoa-nut in the sand, and sit
waiting for fifteen years or more until it
produces a nut, Ceylon is the place for you.

And now for the bar. I may safely assert
that, of all undertakings where the brain is the
capital, this is the best. Litigation is the
favourite amusement of the Cinghalese and
Tamuls; and its being an expensive one does
not deter them. In this little island there are
no less than one hundred and seventy-three
advocates and proctors, some of whom make
as much as twelve or fifteen hundred a year.
But let my friend John Briefless pause a
moment; let him not at once run pell-mell, with
wig on head and gown blowing after him, to
Southampton and woo the breeze to bear him
to the Spicy Island. Much is needed to obtain
a footing, and more to hold it. The educated
young Ceylonese (I use the word in its widest
sense, and intend it to embrace all the sons of