At length, then, the entire island of Ceylon, about a hundred days before Waterloo, had become ours for ever.  Hereafter Ceylon must inseparably attend the fortunes of India.  Whosoever in the East commands the sea, must command the southern empires of Asia; and he who commands those empires, must for ever command the Oriental islands.  One thing only remains to be explained; and the explanation, we fear, will be harder to understand than the problem:  it is—­how the Portuguese and Dutch failed, through nearly three centuries, to master this little obstinate nucleus of the peach.  It seems like a fairy tale to hear the answer:  Sinbad has nothing wilder.  “They were,” says Mr Bennett, “repeatedly masters of the capital.”  What was it, then, that stopped them from going on?  “At one period, the former (i.e. the Portuguese) had conquered all but the impregnable position called Kandi Udda.”  And what was it then that lived at Kandi Udda?  The dragon of Wantley? or the dun cow of Warwick? or the classical Hydra?  No; it was thus:—­Kandi was “in the centre of the mountainous region, surrounded by impervious jungles, with secret approaches for only one man at a time.”  Such tricks might have answered in the time of Ali Baba and the forty thieves; but we suspect that, even then, an “open sesame” would have been found for this pestilent defile.  Smoking a cigar through it, and dropping the sparks, might have done the business in the dry season.  But, in very truth, we imagine that political arrangements were answerable for this long failure in checkmating the king, and not at all the cunning passage which carried only one inside passenger.  The Portuguese permitted the Kandyan natives to enter their army; and that one fact gives us a short solution of the case.  For, as Mr Bennett observes, the principal features of these Kandyans are merely “human imitations of their own indigenous leopards—­treachery and ferocity,” as the circumstances may allow them to profit by one or the other.  Sugarcandy, however, appears to have given very little trouble to us; and, at all events, it is ours now, together with all that is within its gates.  It is proper, however, to add, that since the conquest of this country in 1815, there have been three rebellions, viz. in 1817-18, in 1834, and finally in 1842.  This last comes pretty well home to our own times and concerns; so that we naturally become curious as to the causes of such troubles.  The two last are said to have been inconsiderable in their extent.  But the earlier of the three, which broke out so soon after the conquest as 1817, must, we conceive, have owed something to intrigues promoted on behalf of the exiled king.  His direct lineal descendants are excluded, as we have said, from the island for ever; but his relatives, by whom we presume to be meant his cognati or kinspeople in the female line, not his agnati, are allowed to live in Kandy, suffering only the slight restriction of confinement