thing but friendly glances as we inspected their wares, knowing well that curiosity, not commerce, had brought us there.

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There is no misery, no squalor," we repeated to each other in a breath; "they all seem happy and contented." "Do they generally look thus?" we asked of the dragoman. "It is the same all the days I have come, was the reply, in dragomanic English.

The black articles of merchandize looked at us and smiled, the children, for the most part, continuing their games without heeding us; old men and young ones, old women, matrons, and girls inspected us attentively, and talked incessantly as they did so. We walked round the yard, and peeped into the places where they lived within the verandah. They were infinitely more comfortable and less filthy than the dwellings of the labouring classes in the south of India. The clothes the poor wretches possessed were neither very voluminous nor very fine in quality, but they were more than sufficient for their ideas of decency, and the hot sun of Africa prevented them feeling the want of more; a scanty cloth round the loins was all the covering they had, and they were con

tent with it. The children were naked, and happy and healthful apparently, as children ought to be.

"Tzaffa!" called out a fat pursy Turk, who was diligently fumigating in the corner of the yard; a graceful young girl of fourteen or sixteen years of age bounded to her feet as she heard the call, and going towards her lord, salaamed respectfully as she approached him. She was elegantly formed-her figure might have served as a model for the sculptor, so firm, graceful, and undulating in its outlinesbut her face was Nubian, and contrasted disagreeably with the fine form. Receiving some order from her fat master, she went into an adjoining room and brought him something he required. He took it from her hand without a word. Making a low obeisance, and returning to the group she had left, she sat down again, and commenced talking immediately.

We knew nothing of Tzaffa's history or of her character, but she interested us much, and was frequently afterwards, when we were far away from Cairo, a theme of conversation. Often did we speculate what her fate had been, and what the feelings with which she endured

it. Tzaffa! Tzaffa! the name alone was suf ficient to interest us.

We left the slave-market of Cairo with the conviction that thousands of our own countrymen and countrywomen-that tens of thousands of the natives of India-were more, far more, to be pitied, than the Nubian slaves there exposed for sale.

'PAGES OF CEYLONESE HISTORY.

It would be well for Ceylon and its inhabitants were its history better known to Englishmen generally, and were its affairs brought more prominently before the British public. No one who has visited the island, can help feeling an extraordinary interest in all that appertains to it. Unfortunately for its people, however, its history is not so intimately connected with any portion of that of Greece or Rome as to render the island an object of interest to the classical student. It was but faintly known to the Greek and Latin geographers as Taprobane-they had some indistinct idea that some such island, rich in pearls, cinnamon, and elephants, existed somewhere in the recesses of the Indian Ocean and that goods came from it that had been con

veyed from a far more distant shore, that of China.

Few untravelled Europeans, indeed, realize to themselves the size of Ceylon. They probably look upon it as a sort of counterpart of the Isle of Wight, or Malta, and are possibly incredulous when informed that it is very nearly of the same size as Ireland-Ceylon containing 24,600 square miles, and Ireland about 28,800. They have their doubts, too, when told that it once contained at least five millions of inhabitants, and can still exhibit ruins of cities, once of vast extent, and of buildings that almost rival the pyramids of Egypt in size and age.

But that which more than anything else evidences the greatness of Ceylon in by-gone times, is the fact that it has a continuous history of itself, which extends from five hundred years before Christ up to the period of the Portuguese invasion in 1505 A.D.—a history proving that the people of Ceylon were once a powerful and refined nation, and that too, long ere Julius Cæsar had invaded Britain, or the Celtic inhabitants of these islands had learned the rudiments of civilization. South