"Trincomalee is a town of about 20,000 inhabitants," responded the Doctor, "and stands on one of the finest bays in Asia, if not in the world. It would be a place of great importance on account of the magnificent port, if the country back of it amounted to anything; but, unfortunately, the region for a long distance is marshy and nearly useless, and so the fine harbor of Trincomalee is of no consequence. Moreover it is quite unhealthy, owing to the malaria from the swamps; and it is a common remark in Ceylon that when the Government wishes to get rid of its soldiers, it sends them to Trincomalee to die of fever. [Illustration: THE LAST OF THE GIANTS.] "As to what you could see on the way I might name several things. We should see a tropical forest in all its glory, and make a practical acquaintance with the trees by resting in their shadows, and perhaps climbing their trunks through the aid of the parasitic plants that cover them. There is one tree a few miles out of Kandy which is the remainder of quite a cluster that formerly stood there. All the rest have been killed by the parasites, and this one, the last of the giants, is completely covered, and cannot stand many years longer. "Then we should pass some of the tanks for which Ceylon is famous, or, rather, for which she was famous centuries ago." One of the boys asked what these tanks were, and the Doctor explained their nature. "Rice will not grow without water, and in ancient times a system was adopted of making artificial ponds or tanks to retain water that could be used in the seasons when the rains were not falling. The first of these ponds of which we have any record was built by one of the kings of Ceylon 437 years before our era, or more than 2300 years ago. It became the fashion for kings to build tanks for the benefit of their people, and at one time there was a great number of them; two kings are said to have built sixteen tanks each, and the fashion of building them continued more than a thousand years. "Some were built in the level country, and others among the hills; many still remain, but the greater number are in ruins and quite useless. The engineers who built them became famous, and in the eighth century the Rajah of Cashmere sent to Ceylon for engineers to construct tanks for him. [Illustration: TANK SCENE IN CEYLON.] "The largest of these works in Ceylon is the great tank of Kalewera, which was built 1400 years ago. It is now in ruins and useless, but enough of it remains to show what it was originally; it is supposed to have been forty miles in circumference, and had an embankment of stone twelve miles long. There was another tank twenty miles in circumference, which was formed by damming a small stream with an embankment nearly two miles long and sixty feet wide; but, like most of the others, it is now useless.