"But there are drawbacks to the fun, and it is only fair that we should tell you about them. There are insects of various kinds to trouble you, and the worst of them is the land-leech. He does not live in the water like the ordinary leech, but grows on the trees and bushes, and crawls on the ground; he can drop on you from the trees when you pass beneath them, and he can climb up your body and get inside your clothes. When empty they are not much larger than a needle, but when filled with blood they are as large as a goose-quill, and about two inches long. You can hardly see the young ones, as they are little thicker than hairs; but let them once get fastened to you, and you feel them. So bad are they in some places that they drive people out of houses, and they have attacked persons travelling in carriages by dropping on them from the trees as they passed beneath. "If your blood is in a bad condition, their bites are apt to cause sores which are difficult to heal. In the last war the English had with the natives, the leeches caused more deaths than the snakes, and a great many of the sepoys and coolies employed here died from their bites. We have been bitten by a few of them, and don't want any more experience of the kind. It is a good plan to carry a lemon in your pocket, and when one of these leeches fastens to you, a few drops of lemon-juice will make him let go. The natives smear their bodies with cocoa-nut oil, which prevents the leeches taking hold, and this is perhaps the reason why so much oil is used in Ceylon. "They have water-leeches in great number, which frequently cause the deaths of cattle. They enter the nostrils of the poor brutes when the latter go to drink, and after gorging themselves they fall off and leave the wound to bleed. Very often it does so till the blood, accumulating in the throat, suffocates the animal. "While on this subject, we may as well say that Ceylon is reputed to contain more than 10,000 kinds of insects, besides several parts of the island to hear from. The list of all these varieties might possibly be a little tedious, and so we won't try to give it, but will briefly say they include pretty nearly everything you can think of in the insect line. In the morning, and also in the evening, the hum of the wings of those that can fly is like the noise of machinery in a mill; at noon they are comparatively still, as the heat seems to shut them up. The most of them disappear at the end of the monsoons, but they come up again ready for business in a month or two.