Lots of pets on board—­birds and things.  In these far countries the white people do seem to run remarkably to pets.  Our host in Cawnpore had a fine collection of birds—­the finest we saw in a private house in India.  And in Colombo, Dr. Murray’s great compound and commodious bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods:  frisky little squirrels; a Ceylon mina walking sociably about the house; a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without motion of its beak; also chuckled; a monkey in a cage on the back veranda, and some more out in the trees; also a number of beautiful macaws in the trees; and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds not known to me.  But no cat.  Yet a cat would have liked that place.

April 9.  Tea-planting is the great business in Ceylon, now.  A passenger says it often pays 40 per cent. on the investment.  Says there is a boom.

April 10.  The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is about the divinest color known to nature.

It is strange and fine—­Nature’s lavish generosities to her creatures.  At least to all of them except man.  For those that fly she has provided a home that is nobly spacious—­a home which is forty miles deep and envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it.  For those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain—­a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe.  But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation.  She has given him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth—­the naked bones stick up through it in most places.  On the one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else.  So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to extend the blessings of civilization with.  Yet man, in his simplicity and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the important member of the family—­in fact, her favorite.  Surely, it must occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of showing it.

Afternoon.  The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate’s shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength.  And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back.  Nobody said anything, and the captain went away.  I think he is becoming disheartened . . . .  Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship’s library:  it contains no copy of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing.  A singular book.