APPENDIX  IV.
 

                      SPORT IN CEYLON.



           From Major Skinner's " Fifty Years in Ceylon.::



In  the years 1827-8-9, whenever elephants  made  their  appearance

within thirty or forty miles of Colombo, I received  notice  of  their

arrival from  the headmen, and when I could get leave, exercised my

privilege of taking some of my brother  officers  out shooting.   A good

many absurd incidents occurred on these occasions, on one of which

Captain Forbes, of the 78th Regiment—he has since taken the name of

Forbes-Leslie—and myself  started after a herd,  which was reported to

be about forty miles off.  We got up to the elephants, killed, as  we

thought, one  of them, and  gave chase to the rest.  It  was awfully hot

weather,  and the  pursuit  turned  out unfavourably for. us,  and the

elephants  beat us; so we returned to  our defunct friend,  whom  we

imagined as dead as '' Julius Cajsar," he having resigned to us his tail as

a proof of death ; but he soon began to show signs of animation, which

signs were increased by our repeated  discharge of balls into his head.

To  our no small dismay the animal  presently  discovered  a  tree,  up

which a native had climbed for safety, rushed at  it with great fury and

brought it to the  ground ; in his fall  from the  branches the poor

fellow's skull was terribly fractured, in fact, completely opened.  I did

all I could for him with my small amount of medical skill and appli¬

ances ; I cut off his hair and bandaged up his head with strips of wax

cloth, which we used for the protection of our guns.  In t he course of

the morning he seemed to us all to have passed away ; we felt glad the

poor fellow's sufferings  were over.  With my official  notions  I went

through the form of recording the circumstances attending the accident.

We passed a unanimous opinion that the deceased had met his death

accidentally,  having been killed by a wild elephant.   This nice  little bit

of formality had not been long completed when my attention was drawn

to the fact that, like the elephant who  had injured him,  the man we had

pronounced to have been " accidentally  killed," was  showing unmis¬

takable evidence of life, and we had  to cancel the proceedings of our

impromptu coroner's inquest. I am sorry to be obliged  to add that the

poor man, as  well as the elephant, departed this life the  following day.

  A few years later I was extending my trigonometrical points in this

direction, and overheard one of the attendant headmen giving rather an

amusing account of this affair, and especially of  myself, who had taken

a prominent  part in it.   There was a  large concourse of idlers standing

round the  instrument, and, as I corrected some  of the details of the

story, the  narrator  asked me how I could know anything about it, as

there were only two gentlemen present, one of whom was very  tall, and

the other extremely small.   They were  very much  amused when  I proved

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