doors of the closed palanquin. The Easterns
press forward. "Who is in it?" They learn
the next minute, when a dozen Western hands
are thrust in and drawn out again, and a dozen
swords and other weapons gleam for a moment in
the air, and come showering down upon Eastern
skulls. When I examined next morning the
cuts and the slashes, my wonder was that none
were killed; but the amount of knocking about
that a rice-eater's head can stand, is marvellous.
Taken by surprise, the Easterns made stand for
a few moments, and then retreated in confusion.
Close by the scene of action was a new strongly-
built store, and into it a number of them retreated
and made fast the door. The Westerns
thereupon kept watch and ward over them.
They lighted in the street a blazing fire, so that
none could escape unseen, and on the walls
they wrote in Tamul, "This is the jail bazaar."
Meanwhile, some of the Eastern party who had
remained outside slunk off through by-ways to
where I lived, and gave me as much information
as suited their interests. On reaching the spot,
I found a crowd collected before the bazaar,
and the embers of the fire in the road. When
the prisoners within were told I had arrived,
they thought it was a ruse to get them out.
With the greatest caution they opened one of
the doors ever so little, and when they saw I
really was there, out they came, twenty-three
in all, I think. I know that I marched off forty
fellows to the court-house that night, and they
went as submissively as lambs.

Caste distinctions are a fruitful source of
dispute. Under native rule, the violation of
any prescribed custom, or the attempt to do
what was only permitted to a higher caste, was
a very serious offence. For instance, in the
Kandian country, it was a crime punishable with
death for any one not of the royal family to
whitewash his house. At the present day, in
spite of the complete discountenance of caste
by government, one constantly hears of quarrels
in the remoter parts of the island—and even
near town, where civilisation spreads less slowly
—in consequence of a low-caste man "aping
his betters," as the high caste consider it. For
such a man to tile his house instead of thatching
it, to wear his clothes below the knee, to
allow his wife to drape herself beyond the
prescribed rule, to put on earrings if a Tamulian,
to celebrate a wedding to the sound of music
and with the decorations of clothes—all these
are high crimes and misdemeanors, and the
perpetrators are liable, if not protected, to have
their heads broken and their houses burned about
their ears. The proper course for a public
officer to pursue in such cases is to give the
offenders all the protection of the law; if need
be, to be present himself, to see that the headmen,
who generally sympathise with and are in
league with the high caste, do their duty; and to
visit with condign punishment any one who sets
authority at defiance. A little firmness in one
or two cases has a marvellous effect, and the
battle has seldom to be fought more than once
in the same place.

One way in which an influential man, or party
of men, sometimes take their revenge on a lower
or weaker section of the village, is to forbid the
washerman to wash for them, or the barber to
shave them. They are then at a dead stop; for
nothing would induce a man not of the washer caste
to shoulder his bundle and get up his own cotton:
nor can he, nor would he, make a barber of
himself by shaving his own or his fellow's chin.
This is sometimes a rather difficult measure to
meet, for, of course, under our government the
barber and the "dhobie," or washerman, are
free agents, and it is not easy to say exactly
who the person is who has laid his veto upon
the operations of the two functionaries. Moreover,
were the parties aggrieved to be directed
to bring an action for damages against the
disturber of their peace, they would have to tarry
while their beards were growing and their clothes
getting dirtier. It is a ludicrous sight on these
occasions to a man who shaves himself every day,
to see some twenty or thirty lugubrious-looking
fellows standing in a row, pointing dolefully to
their bristly chins in the most helpless manner,
and crying for some one to shave them. The
magistrate has to remonstrate with the barber
and the dhobie, and after a while some compromise
is made, and the village appears next day
with its chin shorn and its clothes washed.

In the Kandian province there is a class of
people called Rhodias. They are outcasts, and
no words can express the loathing with which
they are regarded by the Kandians. There is
nothing repulsive in their appearance: on the
contrary, their women are the handsomest in
the island, erect as arrows, and graceful as
antelopes. Who they are, is not very clearly
ascertained. My own idea is, that they were the
aborigines of the island, and that the Gangetic
race who subdued the island and built the
famous city of Ameradhapura subjugated them.
Old John Knox, who was a captive in Ceylon
in the year 1679, during the time when Kandy
had a king, and who has written a truthful
work on the island, says that they were
"Dodda Vedahs, which signifies hunters," and
he relates how it was their special duty to
provide game for the king, and how they once
produced before him some flesh which he enjoyed
so much that he told them to get some more.
The barber is in Asia, as in Europe, the great
newsmonger, and the next morning the scraper
of the royal chin communicated to his majesty
the horrible secret that what he had so enjoyed
was human flesh.

Filled with rage, the king made a decree that,
henceforth and for ever, the descendants of these
persons should be outcasts, and be held in
loathing and abhorrence; and from time to time,
when any of his nobles offended him, he ordered
that they and their families should become
"Rhodias"—a punishment worse than death.
There is at the present day the remnant of a
tribe of men who were once more numerous,
who live a wild life in the forest, and are, in
point of civilisation, of the very lowest grade,