They passed stores and large shops that were kept by men with foreign features, but with skins quite as dark as those of the natives. The Doctor said these men were descended from the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to settle in Ceylon, and take possession of the country. Many of them had accumulated large fortunes, and their houses were on a scale that corresponded to the wealth of the owners. Many of these houses have fine gardens attached to them, and there are some gardens that cost many thousands of dollars. The Dutch, who held Ceylon after the Portuguese, and before the English occupation, have left a good many descendants in Colombo, and nearly all of them are rich and correspondingly happy. They spend their lives in Ceylon, and never think of going to Holland to reside.
[Illustration: MOORISH MERCHANTS OF CEYLON.]
There are a good many half-caste descendants of the Dutch and Portuguese, and where they are not transacting business on their own account, they are employed as clerks, either by the Government or by private individuals. The Parsees and Moormen are all merchants, and of late years they have been forced into competition with the Chinese, who have begun to invade Ceylon.
Frank made the following entries in his note-book:
"The Cingalese are said to make good house-servants and artisans, but they will not do much heavy work. For this purpose men called Tamils are imported from Southern India, when they do not come here of their own accord, and recently as many as 100,000 have come to Ceylon in a single year. They are employed on the coffee and tea plantations, and for all sorts of heavy work in the towns; they are larger and stronger than the native Cingalese, and are said to have bad tempers, which get them into a great many quarrels.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF TAMIL COOLIES.]
"It is funny to see so many varieties of color among the people of Colombo. The native Cingalese are of a pure brown, or dark olive; the Malabar negroes are like a piece of charcoal, and the descendants of the Portuguese are nearly as black as the men from Malabar. They have European features with black faces, and on the other hand the descendants of the Dutch settlers are very like the English in the color of their skins. The Cingalese are slender, and have small feet and hands; they wear their hair long, and tie it in a knot at the back of the head, with a tortoise-shell comb to keep it in place. The men have little beards, or none at all; and when I say that the dress of the women is much like that of the men, you can readily understand that it is not easy to pick out the men from the women in a crowd. A couple of yards of cotton cloth wrapped around the waist is the entire dress of a man of the lowest class. As you go up in the social scale, you find the only difference in the dress is that more and better cloth is used for the 'comboy' or skirt, with the addition of a jacket with a single row of silver buttons in front. The height at which the comb is stuck in the hair indicates the caste of the owner, and the quality of the comb itself has something to do with it.