Evil odors are inseparable from the native quarters. That goes without saying, and it is surprising that pestilence does not run riot here. Dirt and contagious diseases certainly thrive in the same atmosphere, and yet one often sees sanitary laws, as we construe them, deliberately outraged without any such results as our best reason would lead us to expect. The author was in Rio Janeiro not long since, at a time when the yellow fever was proving fatal to fifty or sixty persons daily. In the Plaza Don Pedro Second, numbers of idle, lazy fellows lay half drunk, or wholly so, sleeping on the benches under a vertical sun. Some were quite unconscious, even lying upon the damp ground. Apropos of our remark that these people were inviting the fever, an intelligent resident, who was our companion, calmly answered: "Yellow Jack does not choose that class for its victims. They seem to enjoy complete immunity from the pestilence." Seeing was believing, but it was also confounding to one's sense of the eternal fitness of things.
Generally, the scenes and experiences are not quite pleasant as presented to the stranger who visits Black Town, Colombo, for the first time. As he becomes more familiar with the surroundings, however, a picturesque aspect, a depth of rich brown shadows and bits of vivid color, unite to form a pleasing and attractive whole.
Adjoining each of these humble homes which line the thoroughfares, or perhaps just in the rear of them, one is sure to find clusters of bread-fruit, banana, and mango trees, often dominated by a tall, gracefully bending cocoanut palm of columnar proportions. The product of these several fruit-bearers goes far towards feeding the inmates of the cabin, about which they also cast delightful and much-needed shade. Nothing is more ornamental under such circumstances than the large, drooping, pale green leaves of the generously yielding banana, contrasting with the golden yellow bunches of the ripe fruit. The nutritious properties of the banana are far in excess of any other known vegetable food. African explorers have told the author that in an emergency, when threatened with famine, they have sustained life and strength for themselves and their followers upon two bananas a day for six consecutive days, all the time engaged in the hardest sort of foot-travel through the pathless forest. The banana-tree renews itself annually, growing to a height of ten or twelve feet, and bearing heavy clusters of from sixty to a hundred individual fruits, green at first, but golden in hue when ripe. After bearing its fruit, the tree wilts and decays like a cornstalk, but in due time again springs up from the roots to bear another annual luxuriant crop. One clever writer tells us that the banana is "the devil's agent," because the abundant food supply which it affords, demanding so little of man in return, is a promoter of idleness. It is asserted that one acre of these trees will yield as much nutritious matter as sixty acres of wheat, which seems almost incredible. In many countries this fruit is the staff of life, flourishing as far as thirty-five degrees south and thirty-eight north of the equator.