"As the railway leaves Colombo it plunges into a tropical forest, and we were constantly surrounded by the most luxuriant vegetation we have yet seen. For the first thirty miles or more the country is flat, and every little while we dash along the borders of a tiny lake or a marsh full of aquatic plants, which are sometimes so thick that they crowd each other uncomfortably. These lakes are said to be the homes of crocodiles, and certainly they look as though a crocodile might be quite comfortable in them, and have enough to eat and drink. [Illustration: THE WILD FOREST.] "You can hardly imagine how the trees are twisted together, and wound with creeping-plants that sometimes appear to have strangled them. The underbrush is very dense, and I am not surprised to be told that you cannot walk more than half a mile an hour in an unbroken Cingalese forest, as you must cut your way at nearly every step. "We saw a few monkeys playing among the trees, but they are not abundant along the line of the railway, and we must go farther into the interior if we wish to find monkeys in sufficient number to pay for the trouble of looking at them. Even then it will not be easy to get at them, as they can see you long before you see them; and if there is the least fear that you mean to do them harm, they dart out of sight as fast as their legs will carry them. "At Ambepusse station we left the flat country, and began to ascend among the mountains. Up and up we went very rapidly, winding among the steep hills, and looking down from crags where the descent was almost perpendicular for hundreds of feet. If the train had gone from the track and over the edge in any one of a dozen places, it would have been dashed to pieces in a few seconds. It reminded us of some of the points on the Central Pacific Railway in California and Nevada, and especially of 'Cape Horn,' where the train stopped a few minutes to let us enjoy the scenery. But there was this difference here, that we had the trees and plants of the tropics all around us, and the summits of the mountains were steeper and sharper than the sierras, although they were not as high. "A good many travellers have pronounced the railway from Colombo to Kandy the most picturesque in the world; we are not prepared to agree with them fully, as there are many railways we have not seen, but we are sure it would not be easy to find one to surpass it. Doctor Bronson says the scenery reminds him of that between Philippeville and Constantine in Algeria, of the Brenner Pass in the Alps, of the Central Pacific Railway, and of the line from Batavia to Buitenzorg all rolled together; and he adds that the engineering is of the very best class, and the men who laid out and built the line deserve a great deal of credit.