Suddenly we heard a rustling on the side on which the monkeys had first appeared. I was aware of two gleaming yellow eyes, and presently a great leopard, cautiously, stealthily, crept out of the dense foliage, evidently following the spoor. I could have shot him at less than ten yards. In a moment he caught sight of us as our carriage stood still in the road, gave one spring back and vanished. He doubtless was the cause of the old preacher’s strategic retreat, and our presence helped him to make it good. When I saw those yellow eyes I could but think of the myriads of eyes lurking in the jungle, watching unseen, like Fates—eyes of birds, eyes of beasts, eyes of strange, weird insects, little beadlike eyes peering sleeplessly out of flat, triangular heads that lie deadly in the centre of glistening scaled coils. Two little pricks, no more of a wound than could be made by the point of a tiny needle, and in half an hour death—death unshriven. What a wicked, sinful, murderous jungle! How beautiful and how mysterious! Men talk of the silence of the jungle. Is the jungle ever silent? Is there not always the murmur of leaf and bough, stirred in some mysterious way like the quivering aspen—the legendary tree of the Holy Cross, never at rest—even when there seems to be no wind? Is there not always the rustling whisper of malevolent creatures in ambush, waiting to destroy something feebler or less cunning than themselves? What a sight it would be if, as God paraded the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air before Adam that he might name them, we might cause the creatures of just one square mile of the Singhalese forest to be driven in procession before us! The variety of forms, the contrast of stature and girth, from the huge elephant down to the minutest of creeping things—what a wonder-world it would reveal!