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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Nothing exciting has happened for ever so long," said the Story Girl discontentedly, one late May evening, as we lingered under the wonderful white bloom of the cherry trees. There was a long row of them in the orchard, with a Lombardy poplar at either end, and a hedge of lilacs behind. When the wind blew over them all the spicy breezes of Ceylon's isle were never sweeter.
On board the steamer there were a number of Americans, principally ladies, connected, I think, with some missionary undertaking. When we got within about a hundred miles of Ceylon, these American ladies all began repeating to each other the verse of the well-known hymn: "What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,"
I found it by the 9th parallel off the northwestern shores of Ceylon. It was formed by the long curve of little Mannar Island. To reach it we had to go all the way up Ceylon's west coast.
Along about the same time, the boys come home with a ring of mud around their mouths, and exhaling spicy breaths like those which blow o'er Ceylon's isle in the hymn-book. They bear a bundle of roots, whose thick, pink hide mother whittles off with the butcher-knife and sets to steep. Put away the store tea and coffee.
"Your Captain Nemo the devil take him has just made us a very pleasant proposition!" "Oh!" I said "You know about " "With all due respect to master," Conseil replied, "the Nautilus's commander has invited us, together with master, for a visit tomorrow to Ceylon's magnificent pearl fisheries. He did so in the most cordial terms and conducted himself like a true gentleman."
I had been humming "Greenland's Icy Mountains" for several days previously, about all that I knew of Ceylon's isle being contained in one of the verses of that hymn, which I used to sing at missionary meetings, when a minister who had seen the heathen was stared at as a prodigy. And indeed the "spicy breezes blew soft o'er Ceylon's isle" as we approached it in the moonlight.
It is said to have been brought here in the sixteenth century, and the small temple in which it was then placed has been enlarged and made a shrine where costly gifts are laid by devotees from China, Japan, the Malay Peninsula, Siam, and other remote points. Buddhism claims the larger portion of Ceylon's subjects, having in comparison with Hinduism a small following in India, where it originated.
Your atmosphere does not resemble the spicy breezes that blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle. Your energy and enterprise are commendable, and your geographical location is excellent, but you can never become a rival to Saratoga or Newport. Cairo is built in a basin formed by constructing a levee to inclose the peninsula at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
But, alas, the pearl, Ceylon's home product, is to be had only at fabulous prices and not then in its perfection.
The great breakwater, whose first stone was laid by Albert Edward, is penetrated at last, and the polyglot and universal harbor of call unfolds like a fan. There's music within; the breezes bring proof of this. Surely, it is Bishop Heber's trite stanzas repeated in unison by the forgiving populace they are sung everywhere, and why not in Ceylon's great seaport?
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