The drive through the town and out to the Galle Face by the seashore, what a dream it was of tropical splendors of bloom and blossom, and Oriental conflagrations of costume!  The walking groups of men, women, boys, girls, babies—­each individual was a flame, each group a house afire for color.  And such stunning colors, such intensely vivid colors, such rich and exquisite minglings and fusings of rainbows and lightnings!  And all harmonious, all in perfect taste; never a discordant note; never a color on any person swearing at another color on him or failing to harmonize faultlessly with the colors of any group the wearer might join.  The stuffs were silk-thin, soft, delicate, clinging; and, as a rule, each piece a solid color:  a splendid green, a splendid blue, a splendid yellow, a splendid purple, a splendid ruby, deep, and rich with smouldering fires they swept continuously by in crowds and legions and multitudes, glowing, flashing, burning, radiant; and every five seconds came a burst of blinding red that made a body catch his breath, and filled his heart with joy.  And then, the unimaginable grace of those costumes!  Sometimes a woman’s whole dress was but a scarf wound about her person and her head, sometimes a man’s was but a turban and a careless rag or two—­in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin showing—­but always the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and made the heart sing for gladness.

I can see it to this day, that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint, and—­

Just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise a grating dissonance was injected.

Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed—­dressed, to the last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an English or American village.  Those clothes—­oh, they were unspeakably ugly!  Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud.  I looked at my womenfolk’s clothes—­just full-grown duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures —­and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them.  Then I looked at my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself.

However, we must put up with our clothes as they are—­they have their reason for existing.  They are on us to expose us—­to advertise what we wear them to conceal.  They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we despise gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.  But we do not deceive our neighbor; and when we step into Ceylon we realize that we have not