"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. [Illustration: CINGALESE MEN.] "You don't have any trouble in distinguishing a Cingalese from a Moorman or a Parsee, as the dress tells you at a glance. The Cingalese wear nothing on their heads except their hair and the comb, but the Moormen cut their hair just as short as possible, and wear little caps of straw that fit close to the skull. The Parsees have tall caps without rims, the Malabar natives have no caps at all, and the people of European descent wear the European dress, with hats of pith or cork. Sometimes a Cingalese wraps a gay-colored handkerchief around his head; the women cover themselves with jewellery to an extent that must be inconvenient. We saw a woman to-day who had rings on all her toes as well as her fingers; and if her chains, necklaces, bracelets, and anklets were all solid, they would have weighed many pounds. Poor people follow the example of the rich--the men by wearing wooden combs, and the women by decorating themselves with imitation jewellery made out of sea-shells, carved wood, sharks' teeth, and the like, and they sometimes wear two or three pounds of glass beads strung into necklaces. [Illustration: CINGALESE WOMEN.]