The whole scenery of the town—with its great variety of clay houses, huts, and sheds; its patches of green pasture for oxen, horses, camels, donkeys, and goats; its deep hollows containing ponds overgrown with water-plants; its noble trees, the symmetric gónda or papaya, the slender date-palm, the spreading alléluba, and the majestic bombyx, or silk-cotton tree; the inhabitants, gay in diversified costumes, from the half-naked slave to the most elaborately dressed Arab—forms an animated picture of a world complete in itself; a strange contrast to European towns in external form, and yet, after all, in social inequalities, in the difference of happiness and comfort, activity and laziness, luxury and poverty, exactly similar. Here a row of shops is filled with articles of native and foreign produce, with noisy buyers and sellers in every variety of figure, complexion, and dress, yet all intent upon gain, and endeavouring to get the advantage of each other; there, a large shed, like a hurdle, full of half-naked, half-starved slaves, torn from their quiet homes, from their wives, husbands, parents, arranged in rows like cattle, and staring with hopeless eyes upon the purchasers, wondering, perhaps, into whose hands it would be their lot to fall. How dark to them the mystery of life! In another part may be seen all that can minister to human ease and comfort, and the wealthy buying dainties and delicacies for his table, while the poor man eyes wistfully a handful of grain. Here a rich governor, dressed in silk and gaudy clothes, mounted upon a spirited and richly caparisoned horse, is followed by a troop of idle, insolent menials; there, a blind pauper gropes his way through the restless, excited multitude, and fears at every step to be trodden underfoot. Observe yonder a yard neatly fenced with mats of reed, and provided with all the comforts which the country affords; a clean, neat-looking cottage, with nicely polished clay walls, a shutter of reeds placed against the low, well-rounded door, to forbid abrupt intrusion on the privacy of domestic life; a cool shed for the daily household work; a fine spreading alléluba tree, affording a pleasant shade in the noontide hours, or a stately gónda or papaya lifting its crown of feather-like leaves on a slender, smooth, and undivided stem, or the tall and useful date-tree, adding its charm to the fair scene of domestic peace and comfort,—the matron, in a clean black cotton gown wound round her waist, and with her hair trimly dressed, busily preparing the meal for her absent husband, or spinning cotton, and at the same time urging the female slaves to pound the corn; the children, naked and merry, playing about in the sand, or chasing a straggling, stubborn goat; earthenware pots and wooden bowls, cleanly washed, all standing in order. Our survey also includes a “máciná”—an open terrace of clay, with a number of dyeing-pans, and people actively