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At the main entrance are placed, as usual, two hideous idols of colossal size, figures half animal and half human in design, with strangely distorted countenances. Here the shaven-headed priests were busy performing rites and chanting before burning incense and lighted candles, after the Roman Catholic style.

Besides the usual caravans of horses, donkeys, and two-wheeled vans, we occasionally met with a party of shaven-headed Tibetans traveling either as emissaries, or as traders in the famous Tibetan sheep-skins and furs, and the strongly-scented bags of the musk-deer. A funeral cortège was also a very frequent sight.

The women are always shaven-headed, wear voluminous robes of soft leather, and carry a great weight of heavy wire wound into anklets and stockings, and brought to a high state of polish. So extensive are these decorations that they really form a sort of armour, with breaks only for the elbow and the knee joints. The married women wear also a great outstanding collar.

Wild but not inharmonious music from shaven-headed members of an orchestra of weird instruments gongs, shawns, cymbals, long silver trumpets deafened the ears. Crowds of gaily-clad spectators covered the flat roofs of the building and arcades, thronged the verandahs, filled the windows and squatted around the courtyard these last kept in order by bullet-headed lamas with whips.

The knots of men, scattered here and there in buzzing discussion, were all dark-robed merchants and white-bearded judges, while around the table under the window a dozen shaven-headed monks were working busily with writing tools. The King himself was no longer armored, but weapon-less and clad in velvet.

The same class of natives are met with at Kandy as are seen on the coast, except that there are more shaven-headed priests in yellow robes, one end of which is thrown over the left shoulder, leaving the right arm and shoulder bare. The wearers are marked by a moody, unsatisfied expression.

The time-keeping steps of the soldiery upon the marble floor mingled with drum, fife, and organ. Through all this, one caught now and then the monotonous voice of a shaven-headed priest, reciting his prescribed part at the altar, kneeling and reading at intervals.

Now, Gabriel had been looking forward to reaching the dark lane, because it was, generally speaking, a nice, gloomy, mournful place, into which the townspeople did not much care to go, except in broad daylight, and when the sun was shining; consequently, he was not a little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song about a merry Christmas, in this very sanctuary which had been called Coffin Lane ever since the days of the old abbey, and the time of the shaven-headed monks.

The merry voices of the latter, as they played on the grass, came to my ears most gratefully. There is nothing so sweet as to hear one's native tongue in a foreign land from the lips of children! A pilgrimage to Vallombrosa! in sooth it has a romantic sound. The phrase calls up images of rosaries, and crosses, and shaven-headed friars.

Outwardly the rows of clean-faced, comfortably dressed, well-shod American children, sitting in chairs, bore no resemblance to shaven-headed, barefooted little Arabian students, squatting on the floor, gabbling loud uncomprehended texts from the Koran; but the sight of Sylvia's companions bending over their school-books with glazed, vacant eyes, rocking back and forth as a rhythmical aid to memorizing, their lips moving silently as they repeated over and over, gabblingly, the phrases of the printed page, might have inclined a hypothetical visitor from Mars to share the bewildered amusement of the American visitors to Moslem schools.