Every Day Life on a Ceylon Cocoa Estate by Mary E. Steuart

JUNE 7th. - The "Big Monsoon" has come. This is the one topic of conversation; our correspondents repeat it, and so do the local newspapers. You, too, would think it an important event if you had been longing and wearying for it for weeks; we have been panting and gasping under a cloudless sky with the shade thermometer registering over 90 degrees day after day; with nights little cooler than the days; miasma mists creeping and crawling up the course of the two rivers; sick coolies found fever-struck lying about the Estate, and numbers coming morning and evening up to the bungalow for medical treatment.

Barring one, this is the latest monsoon on record. Clouds have, for same days, been banking up in the south west, and on the night of June 5th, the real burst was upon us. A furious gale from the south west sprung up suddenly, bringing with it a deluge of rain; it has gone on blowing for the last two days. A real good old gale, that reminds one of the Equinoctials at home. The wind has all the freshness of its landless home in the southern ocean, and blows straight across Ceylon, carrying all the miasma and stagnant air away to the Bay of Bengal. We have all revived under its influence; the animals are quite frisky, and the cocoa and coffee have lost the drooping aprarance which the great heat produced. Superintendents now work with redoubled energy, and very requisite this is, for during monsoon time all the planting of the year has to be done, and the contents of the cocoa nurseries, which have been reared with such care during the hot season, have now to be placed in the holes already prepared for their reception. The importance of supply will be understood, when it is taken into consideration that cocoanuts usually take seven years, and cocoa four to six years to come into bearing; so if trees die, and are not replaced, a time must come when the owner will find himself without any crop.