coffee, much about horseflesh, more about elephants, and most of all about cigars, and I saw no reason why I should not succeed. When I had altered the ode* of Horace to suit the colonial secretary and Ceylon, asking him, in elegant Latinity, why he hastened to destroy the island; by loving it too well, had not the joke called forth an angry correspondence between Philos and Milos, as to the authorship? Why, then, should I not succeed? Such were the reflections that passed through my mind-such the questions I asked myself, when my uncle observed, "With your management and with your pen, the number of subscribers will soon be a thousand." "I do not see why it should not," I answered inwardly, but a smile was the only external evidence of the thought. "Dr. Tweezer," said I, "assures me that the coffee-mania cannot last much longer-that the days of its success will soon be ended-and that it would be folly to trust to it alone." "Dr Tweezer The eighth ode of the first book, commencing "Lydia, dic, per omnes Te Deos oro, Sybarin cur properas amando has his money largely embarked in sugarplanting," was my uncle's reply, "no wonder he distrusts coffee." "Well, but, my dear uncle," I observed, determined to put an end to this unpleasant scene by soothing him, "Mr. Pinto, the Portuguese agent, looked after the estate very well before I came; he can return to it now, and I will run up often, to see how he gets on." "Well, well, you are determined on it, I see," said the old man kindly, "and must have your way as usual. I wish you every success with the paper, my boy; and, between us, we must see that Pinto minds what he's about-he will be honest as long as he's well looked after." So saying, my uncle gave a final polish to his head with his handkerchief, and threw the end of his cigar into the fire. The office of the Ceylon Herald was situated in one of the narrow streets of the Fort of Colombo, a street principally occupied by Portuguese shoemakers and tailors, and the junior officers of Her Majesty's hundred and forty-fourth, then quartered in Colombo. The floor and the roof were both constructed of red tiles; those beneath our feet flat for walking on, those above us curved, in order to lap over each other and exclude the rain. A small verandah formed a kind of vestibule to the office, the roof being supported by rude wooden pillars, once painted, although what colour they had been painted it would not be easy to discover by examining them. Of the large room which formed the front of the house, opening out on the verandah, a portion near the window was screened off to form the sacred chamber of the editor, whilst the part near the door, which was always open, was allotted to the solitary clerk who received the advertisements, watched their insertion, computed their cost, and made out the bills. In the adjoining chamber stood the type-cases of the compositors, so that the editor had but to pass from his little screened-off chamber into the adjoining room to discover his editorials cut up into convenient lengths, and being "done into" print by the swarthy fingers of Portuguese and Singhalese compositors. Over these reigned the head printer, Don Gonzalez Antonio de Perez, a Portuguese descendant, as black and ugly as the swarthiest borderer on Lake Tschad, in the centre of Africa. I never knew the real name of Mr. Perez, as we called him, until he laid a note on my table one day, asking whether he, "Mr. Don Gonzalez Antonio De Perez," might have "the supreme felicity and honour" of seeing me, "when he consummated his nuptials with Miss Felicia Maria St. Anna Hernandez," as he expressed it. Mr. Perez, I say, was the presiding genius of the dining-room; that is, of what had been the dining-room, but was now the compositors' office. In shirt-sleeves rolled up to the shoulder, revealing two slender black arms, and in pantaloons once white, did Mr. Perez administer rebuke and commendation as he listed to those beneath him. He prided himself on his knowledge of English, which, however, he spoke after the Portuguese fashion-he had been reading and misunderstanding Carlyle, and prided himself on being one of those intensely earnest, practical men, who cannot understand a joke, and who talk of their "mission." Of voluble tongue, fluent in English, in Portuguese, in Singhalese, he talked and worked incessantly, never for a moment idle, never for a moment at rest. An invaluable man under the circumstances, but obstinate as a donkey. The compositors' office opened into a paved yard behind, in the centre of which stood a melancholy-looking jack-fruit tree, with a few dark, scanty leaves adorning its branches; so little green, so much black, about its trunk and limbs, that one might almost conclude at a glance it had been nourished with ink instead of water. In an apartment of the back premises, which had once been a kitchen, stood the printing-press, doubtless of a similar form to that which William Caxton, of venerable memory, had used when he set up his marvellous engine in Westminster, "hard by the cathedral," so clumsy, so awkward in its wooden. massiveness, did it appear. Brushes and buckets; piles of paper and of papers; dark, ink-bespattered boys, looking forward to a future intimately connected with the composing-stick, and two or three lazy, lounging Singhalese messengers, completed the furniture, animate and inanimate, of the Ceylon Herald office, Totally ignorant of the mysteries of printing-innocent of the difference between a composing-stick and a galley, between Great Primer type and Diamond-I seated myself at |