Once before I had come across the traces of the great Reading potentates in a strange place. It was in Mongolia, three or four hundred miles north of Peking. I had taken refuge from the noon-day sun in a Mongol encampment, and the chieftainess, a fat, hideous old woman, shapeless in her sheepskin robe, allowed me and my companion, for a consideration, to rest in her _yurt_, a leathern tent with an opening at the top to let out the smoke of the camel-dung fire. She was a great lady in her way, though very dirty, and the outward and visible sign of her high position was a large Huntley and Palmer tin, in which were growing a few heads of garlic wherewith to flavour the mess of mutton and millet, with chunks of brick tea and salt, which was stewing in her gipsy kettle. Of that tin she was as proud as a duchess of her strawberry leaves. When the preliminaries of my business were settled I had a few days on my hands, while the lawyers were playing their part. If the law is slow in England it will readily be conceived that it acquires no speed in the sweltering heat of Colombo; so Yorke and I determined, after seeing Neuara Eliya and Kandy, to go and explore the mysteries of the buried city of Anuradhapura far away in the north. I believe that it is now brought into touch with the rest of the world by a railway; but seventeen years ago that did not exist. So we hired a carriage and started from Matalé. We saw the carved cave temples of Dambulla and in the distance the great rock fortress of Sigiri—marvels in their way; but the attraction was Anuradhapura, the capital of the kings when Lanka had not yet become degraded into Ceylon. For many miles the road ran through the thick, impenetrable forest—a little thinner in places close to the wayside. Here and there a small clearing and a few native huts; but for the most part not a human habitation, nor a brown man, woman, or child, to be seen. The steamy air was full of that subtle, mysterious perfume of heavily-scented flowers and rich, pungent spices which is wafted far out to sea. The very leaves of the forest seemed to thrill at the voluptuous caress of the soft, perfumed breeze. A delicious, languorous, enervating atmosphere, in which to dream and never to do. Some of the huge butterflies are very beautiful. Of birds we did not see many, nor did we hear their song—though some are said to pipe most sweetly. One bird there is that breaks the stillness with its hoarse melancholy croak in which the Singhalese imagination hears the words, “Ko Hattha Paroa! Ko Hattha Paroa! Where are the seven axes!” Just as our children hear in the call of the cushat the exhortation to the thief to “take two coos, Taffy—take two coos, Taffy.”