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For a long time, this beautiful land, rich in all the gifts of nature, languished under the rule of Portuguese Viceroys, with a thinly-scattered population, poor, oppressed, and destitute of all mental culture. At length, the year 1807 opened to it a brighter prospect. Napoleon's ambitious views extending even to Portugal, forced the Royal Family to take refuge in the colonies.
In a jungle-covered country like Ceylon, diseases of the most malignant character are harbored in these dense and undisturbed tracts, which year after year reap a pestilential harvest from the thinly-scattered population. Cholera, dysentery, fever and small-pox all appear in their turn and annually sweep whole villages away.
Then I left the water and the green ribbon that followed its margin, and, taking a sheep-track, rose upon the arid steeps, where the thinly-scattered aromatic southern-wood was putting forth its dusty leaves. The bare rocks, yellow, white, and gray, towered above me; they were beneath me; they faced me across the valley; wherever I looked they were shutting me off from the outer world.
The region around, for hundreds of miles, was uninhabited, for the thinly-scattered, half-human Bushmen who dwelt within its limits, hardly deserved the name of inhabitants any more than the wild beasts that howled around them. I have said that Von Bloom now followed the occupation of a "trek-boer."
Pools of water had collected in the narrow and little-frequented streets, and as many of the thinly-scattered oil-lamps had been blown out by the violence of the wind, the walk was not only a comfortless, but most uncertain one.
Without dwelling just at present upon the natural wants and sufferings to which savage men are perpetually exposed in the wilderness of Australia, it is deplorable to think of how many evils these thinly-scattered tribes are the cause to each other; enormous and sad is the amount of suffering, which, even in those lonely and unfrequented regions, human beings are constantly bringing upon their brethren or neighbours.
Civil war and oppression now lay waste those extensive regions. Population does not increase, and the thinly-scattered inhabitants are too much absorbed in the cares of self-defence even to attempt any melioration of their condition. Such, however, will not always be the case.
You may observe that his nose is flat and sunk below the level of his cheeks; that his cheeks are prominent, his lips very thick, his nostrils wide, his face beardless, and his head almost hairless for the small kinky wool-knots thinly-scattered over his skull can scarcely be designated hair.
It had opened the great feast of colour that brings the year to its gray, sad close. But the sky was brilliantly blue when I left St. Pierre-Toirac. The next village was Laroque-Toirac. The houses were clustered near the foot of an escarped hill, where thinly-scattered pines relieved the glare of the naked limestone.
Not that it was one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly-desirable tithes.
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