CHAPTER III.
Task Completed--The Mountain-top--Change in the Face of Nature--Original Importance of Newera Ellia--"The Path of a Thousand Princes"-- Vestiges of Former Population--Mountains--The Highlands of Ouva--Ancient Methods of Irrigation--Remains of Aqueducts--The Vale of Rubies--Ancient Ophir--Discovery of Gold-Mineral Resources--Native Blacksmiths.
In a climate like that of Newera Ellia, even twelve months make a great change in the appearance of a new settlement; plants and shrubs spring up with wonderful rapidity, and a garden of one year's growth, without attendance, would be a wilderness.
A few years necessarily made a vast change in everything.

All kinds of experiments had been made, and those which succeeded were persevered in.

I discovered that excellent beer might be made at this elevation (six thousand two hundred feet), and I accordingly established a small brewery.
The solitary Leicester ram had propagated a numerous family, and a flock of fat ewes, with their lambs, throve to perfection.

Many handsome young heifers looked very like the emigrant bull in the face, and claimed their parentage.

The fields were green; the axe no longer sounded in the forests: a good house stood in the centre of cultivation; a road of two miles in length cut through the estate, and the whole place looked like an adopted "home." All the trials and disappointments of the beginning were passed away, and the real was a picture which I had ideally contemplated years before.