The love of gambling is inherent in every Oriental mind, and the merest beggar with but a few pice in his wallet to buy his daily food will invest them in a small number of oyster-shells, hoping to find a pearl of great value; and, should he fail to do so, he contents himself with eating the oyster and hoping for better luck next time.  The shells are generally left on the sand in carefully guarded heaps till they die and open, when the pearls are extracted, and the fish left to decay.  Some of the oysters are taken in sealed-up sacks to Colombo, Kandy, and other inland places, in order to enable people to indulge their love of gambling and speculation, without the trouble of a journey to Manaar.  Though called oysters, they are not the proper oyster, but a sort of avicula (Meleagrina margaritifera being the name given by Samarik), very different from the large mother-of-pearl shells in which the South Sea pearls are found.

I have not been able to keep my mind from running incessantly on Sir Emerson Tennent’s delightful book on Ceylon, which describes places we have not ourselves visited, but which I wanted very much to see, and I have been so interested reading about them that I cannot help thinking other people will share my feelings.  It seems wonderful that so much which is strange, beautiful, and interesting should be so easy of access from England, and yet that so few English travellers know comparatively anything of Ceylon, except Galle and Colombo, and perhaps Kandy and Trincomalee.

Saturday, April 7th.—­To-day we passed close to the island of Minnikoy, between the groups of islands called the Laccadives and Maldives, some of which we saw dotting the horizon; and still further to the south stretches the Chagos Archipelago.  It was very hot all day, with hardly a breath of air, and we have all returned to our former light and airy costumes:  the gentlemen to their shirts and trousers, the children to their pinafores and nothing else, and I to my beloved Tahitian dresses.

Before we left England we could not make ourselves believe what we were told about heat in the tropics; so we started with very few windsails and without any punkahs or double awnings.  It was all very well in the Atlantic or Pacific, but between Hongkong and Singapore the state of things became simply unbearable.  The carpenter has rigged up a punkah, and the men have improvised some double awnings.  At Colombo they made some windsails, so we are now better off than on our last hot voyage.  It has been really hotter than ever to-day, but a pleasant breeze sprang up in the afternoon.