The scene is occasionally varied by a group of men sitting upon their heels and absorbed in gambling for small sums of money. It should be stated here that the natives, Singhalese, Tamils, Moormen, or of whatever tribe, are all inveterate gamblers; only the Chinese can equal them in this propensity to risk all they possess upon the cast of the dice, or in betting upon some other trivial game. We were told of instances where the gambler, having lost everything else, staked the possession of his wife against his opponent's money, and, losing, the woman quietly acquiesced in consummating the arrangement. Women of the humbler castes are looked upon more as slaves than as filling any other relation to those whom they call their husbands. As a rule, they would not think of asserting any will of their own. As their husbands are abject slaves to the idea of caste, so they are slaves to their husbands, and however roughly they are treated by them, they take it quite as a matter of course. In the southern part of the island especially, each village has its cock-pit and its gambling-den; while hard by is the drinking-cabin, where for a few pennies a native can get very drunk on arrack.
At some of the low-thatched cabins in the Pettah, or Black Town, we see a tame parrot or a pet monkey confined within certain bounds by a small chain. If the former, he is likely to be imitating the boisterous exclamations of the children; if the latter, finding no mischief possible, he sits chin in hand, with a ludicrously grave expression on his too human features. The ever-present crows take good care to keep out of the monkey's reach, but perch familiarly and fearlessly anywhere else about the cabins. There are several varieties of monkeys in the island. The black wanderoo of Ceylon with white whiskers comes nearest in its resemblance to the human face. He stands three feet high, and weighs between seventy and eighty pounds, being remarkable for muscular strength. The lower and the upper jaw are in a direct line with the forehead, while most of the race have projecting jaws.
The streets and environs of Constantinople are rendered hardly more disagreeable by the presence of mongrel curs than is Black Town, Colombo. Dogs abound, thoroughly useless creatures, which should have been born jackals, and which are perhaps partly breeds from that source. They are melancholy, half-starved, wretched, and mangy creatures, sleeping all day, and prowling about at night in search of some stray bit of carrion which has escaped the vigilance of the crows. Why they are tolerated no one can say, neither does any one acknowledge their ownership. Occasionally one runs mad, causing by his bite a half-dozen natives to do likewise, when death is certain. Hydrophobia is never cured, not even by the devil-dancers of Ceylon. The normal appearance of these dogs is that of abject fear, as they move about with heads drooping and their tails pressed close between their hind legs. A harsh word sends them off at top speed, while a kind one brings out their instinctive fondness for the human race. Still, they are nuisances in Ceylon, and of no earthly good to any mortal.