Following a tapper on his round in a plantation is a very easy expedition compared with that journey we took with a seringueiro to see him get his morning’s milk. The plantation tapper is surrounded by rubber-trees, they are never very far apart, and even when, for some reason or other, he has to pass one by without operating on it, the distance from his last stopping-place to his next is quite short. As a rule, only trees that measure at least 18 inches round at 3 feet from the ground are tapped, but some trees, even though they belong to the grown-ups, have to be missed out for a time because they are doing a rest cure. Most of the trees in a grown-up section are, however, tapped daily, or on alternate days, for the greater part of the year, but the circumference of the trunk is so portioned off for operations that no part is retapped until old wounds have completely healed. Yet it is seldom that a tree is tapped at a higher distance than can be conveniently reached from the ground. The amount of milk yielded by a tree depends partly on its age, and partly on the state of its health. If a tree gives enough milk to make about 3/4 pound of rubber the first year it is tapped, it is considered a good specimen. As it grows older, the yield should steadily increase. During 1909, one of the finest old Hevea trees in Ceylon, aged thirty-three, gave 15 gallons of milk, which contained 76 pounds of rubber. At random we choose which coolie we will accompany on his round, and as we dog his footsteps we see a great deal of the outdoor life on a rubber plantation. At first, all our attention is taken up by watching how the one tapper does his work. The trees he visits already bear a herringbone, or half herringbone, design on the lower part of the trunk; but it consists of alternate strips of almost bared wood and of bark, slanting down into the central line. With a tool something like a chisel, the coolie takes a shaving off each strip of bark, whereupon milk oozes out from the cuts, makes for the central channel, and trickles down into an enamel cup that awaits it at the base of the trunk. Presently we are joined by another onlooker. Although he looks very much like a coolie, he is far and away the superior of the working-class mass. He is a “kangany,” an enterprising native who serves the planter in the double rôle of recruiting-sergeant and overseer. He makes periodical journeys to India to arrange for new batches of Tamils to emigrate to the rubber-growing districts; he brings his recruits to the particular district which is his headquarters, and sees them settled on this estate or that; and until he is again wanted to go off recruiting, he joins the staff of some plantation, and takes up the duties of teaching the new hands their work, and of seeing that a certain gang of the old ones are kept up to the mark.