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Landing at Tuticorin.| |7.

The Bazaar, Tuticorin.| |8.

Spinning Mill at Tuticorin.| |9.

Ducks at Tuticorin.| We land. Dark gesticulating figures surround us, scantily clad in white cotton. The morning sun casts long shadows, but there is a throng of people, for the work of India is done in the cool of the morning. The express train to Madras is waiting, but we have a short time for that first stroll, which leaves so deep an impression on the traveller setting foot in a new land. Tuticorin is a remote provincial city, a Dover or a Calais, on the passage from Ceylon. Here is a picture of its little bazaar with dark people in flowing white robes; there is a country cart in the street—ox-drawn. Next we have a nearer view of the spinning mill with a half-naked workman in the foreground. Under the shade of these leafy trees is a flock of ducks for sale. At every turn we see something characteristic, and must ask questions.

|Repeat Map No. 3.| We leave Tuticorin and travel for a hundred miles across the plain. It is a barren-looking country and dry, though at certain seasons there is plentiful rain, and crops enough are produced to maintain a fairly dense population. Far down on the western horizon, as we journey northward, are the mountains of the Malabar Coast, for in this extremity of India the Western and Eastern Ghats have come together and there is no plateau between them. The mountains rise from the western sea and from the eastern plain into a ridge along the west coast whose summits are about as high as the summits of Ceylon, that is to say some 8,000 feet. A group of small hills, isolated on the plain, marks the position of Madura, a hundred miles from Tuticorin. Madura is the seat of one of the finest temples in the land.