Knoxville journal. [volume] (Knoxville, Iowa) 1874-1986, 1876-10-11
Knoxville Journal
strangely Bee-othed.
KsoxyIILE, ocToBER 2. 1870.

nv fathef, as he frightened the reiI
of his sturdy hiII-pony. "syeIl
well, my dear, / have to face thu
heat, too, and shall envy you thu
shadeof your favorite trees, beside
the big tank. That Malabar head.
man / spokeof, who has Just brought
over fresh gang Of coolies from the
mainland. has promised to meet me
in front Of the joss-house in the Ma
Tantee village, to see if we can come
to terms. / shall be back before TIFF.
fin time, / hope"
And, with a kindly nod andsnlile,
he rode off at brisk trot; his horse
keeper, barefooted Cingalese lad,
easily keeping pace with the pony,
and running swift and silent, like 9
shadow, beside his masters stirrup
Times had changed, and for the
worse, since Mr.. Travers had been
reckoned among the most thriving
coffee planters in Ceylon. Our once
famous plantation, called Travers
after the family that had possessed
it for two generations, was not now
the source of profit that, in my
grandfatheT's time, it had been
The rich soil, worn out by over-crop-
ping and neglect, no longer yielded
its heavy harvest of red-brown ber-
ries; while to reclaim fresh land from
the Jungle was both toilsome and
costly. The estate gave us the
means of Maintenance, and little
more.
was an only child, and my father
was a widower, 80 that our actual
necessities, in that cheap and frugal
country, were easily provided for;
nor should l have care i'm the
world, save for the old, old story OF
love, the course of which hard cir
cumstances would not suffer to run
smooth. Our nearest neighbor-and
Christian neighbors, with white
faces and English-speaking tongues,
were scarce in Northern Ceylon--
was Mr.. Forster, a planter, by far
wealthier than we were. Now Os-
valid Forster and i were plighted
lovers, but the very idea of an en-
gagement between his only con and
the daughter Of his embarrassed
neighbor was gall and worm wood to
Oswald's father, proud, strong
willed man, who managed his thriv-
ing property so as to extract from
every beegah OF arabic land it's ut
most yield Of silver rupees.
DESTROYS TO efface from Oswald's
mind the idea of marrying poor lit
tie Ellen Travers, Mr.. Forster, with
his wife's concurrence, proposed to
send his son to Europe, Confident
that foreign travel and change Of
scene would soon obliterate from his
memory the image Of the lonely lit
tie girl beside the great Tank of
Minary. And now n word concern
ing the Tank itself, the name of
which, l fear, conveys TO European
readers but very inadequate con-
ception Of the stupendous reality.
The Tank of Minary, justly reckoned
among the marvels which the island
of Ceylon has still to show, isperhaps
the largest of the artificial lakes ever
planned by mortal engineer. More
than two thousand years have passed
since, before the Christian era, a
Buddhist king babe his subjects toll
to erect the massive walls of hewn
stone and tough chunam, that en-
viron that vast sheet of water,
twenty-five miles in circumference.
With the Minary, Lake or Tank,
which lay close to my own house, /
had been, from childhood, familiar;
and l dearly loved the mirror-like
.expanse of Its calm waters, studded
with hotaing islands of the crimson
.blossomed lotus of India, the red
flowers and green leaves Of which
covered many thousand acres OF the
surface. Strange fish, of brilliant
.colors, glided in glittering shoals
Through the deep, clear water, rare
|ly disturbed by prov or paddle;
bright birds, Of every size, from the
scarlet flamingo to the tiny oriole or
the towering adjutant, haunted it;
and all around grew in dense profu-
sion the mighty trees and Towering
.creepers Of the virgin forest, whence
came at times the complaining cry
OF the mountain cat, the belling of
the deer, The panther's snarl, or the
crashing of the cane and sapling, rs
wild elephants forced their way
Through the trackless recessess of the
jungle.
am bound to admit that there
were other tenants of lake and forest
less attractive than the bright-plum-
aged birds, and the pretty little liz
ards basking in the patches Of yellow
sunshine. Alligaiors were very
common, snakes plentiful, and the
ccorpion, the centipede and the tree
.{eech were often to be met with in
he more swampy and tangled
racks of the woodland. But we,
Who were colonial-born, learn n dis
tegard, of the creeping things that
ourround US, which astonishes new
trivial from Europe, and / had never
"a my life known what 1t was to
feel real fear Of beast or reptile.
/ watchad my fathers retiring
a-,~. until N dizapoorpd amid tina