town equal to Futtehpore, Cawnpore, or Mynporee. There townships, deserving of the name, occur only along the banks of the Bhagiruttee. If villages in the Doab are less picturesque, they are at the same time less subject to epidemics than the woody villages of Bengal. In a Bengal village hardly any better food is generally procurable than coarse rice, and lentils, and goor. In the rural districts of the Doab, flour, vegetables, fruits, milk, and sweetmeats are as abundant and excellent as in a metropolis. The food of a people is the best criterion of its condition. Here the rural population is more intelligent and spirited than the same class in Bengal. The ryot in Hindoostan is no less a bondsman to the mahajun than the ryot in Jessore or Dacca; but he is more independent-minded, and would not tamely put up with the outrages that are inflicted by a Bengal Zemindar or Indigo-planter. Unquestionably, the humblest Doabee lives upon better food, and covers his body with more abundant clothing, than the humblest Bengalee. The cattle here are various. Camels, buffaloes, horses, donkeys, and oxen are all made to assist man in his labours. In Bengal the oxen alone form beasts of burden. The fashion of Hindoostanee coolieism is to take the load over the waist, and not upon the head. In Calcutta, the Baboos who talk big of politics and reformations, do not know what it is to ride. In Hindoostan, rural women perform journeys on horseback, and princesses discuss the merits of horsemanship. The fondness of the Doabee women for coloured millinery certainly evinces a more refined

female taste, and to them may remotely be traced the impetus which is given to the various dye-manufactures of our country. The agricultural women of the Doab use ornaments of brass and bell-metal. The same class in Bengal is in the habit of wearing shell-ornaments— ornaments that first came into fashion with the savages, though sometimes a pair of Dacca shell-bracelets may cost the sum of two hundred and fifty rupees.

One particular ornament in general use amongst the Doabee women, of both the upper and lower classes, is the teeka, which is in the shape of a tiny crescent made of gold, silver, or tinsel, according as the female is circumstanced. It is stuck with an adhesive substance on the forehead, just between the eyebrows. The smooth white expanse of a female forehead-with the profile of the dark curls of hair, and the pair of lustrous orbs shedding their soft effulgence,-forms the highest attraction in the beauty of a woman. But Hindoostanee taste mars the effect of that beauty by placing the teeka, like an imitated moon, in the broad heaven of a woman's face. These teekas are not a little prized and coveted by the Hindoostanee sparks. They train bulbuls to execute little commissions of gallantry. On a given signal, the bird goes, seizes, and carries off the teeka from the forehead of a woman, as precious booty, to her pining lover.

In the days that Bishop Heber travelled through the Doab, he saw the very common people going to market carrying swords and shields, spears, or matchlock guns. There was a time when agriculturists 'were

Former and present State of the Doab.

373

obliged to follow the plough with their swords by their sides, and their friends around them with their matchlocks in hand, and matches lighted.'* The nation was then one of lawless and violent habits, and no man was sure that he might not at any moment be called upon to fight for his life and property. This state of things, consequent on the anarchy which succeeded the effetism of the Mogul power, had ushered into existence various denominations of banditti. For a series of years, the thoroughfares of the Doab were haunted by brigands plundering and murdering in the broad daylight. It was on the discovery of thirty dead bodies in different wells of the Doab, that Thuggeeism first came to the knowledge of the Calcutta Council in 1810. But in fifty years the police has been so much reformed as that the Thug has entirely disappeared, and is known to our generation only from reading. The trader and traveller now pass along the loneliest highway without losing a pin. If a corpse were now discovered in a well, or found by the side of a jungle, it would cause a general uproar in the community, and create a greater sensation than the irruption of a Mahratta horde. The wicked have been weaned from their life of rapine, and taught to subordinate themselves to the authorities of society and the state. But the mutiny was a fatal error, and it once more plunged the country into the misrule of past ages. It jeopardized the vital interests of India, and was to have proved suicidal of her fate. The exit of the English would have undone all the good that is slowly

*Rambles and Recollections,' vol. ii. p. 181.

paving the way to her regeneration. Rightly understood, to own the government of the English is not so much to own the government of that nation, as to own the government of enlightened legislation, of the science and civilization of the nineteenth century, of superior intelligence and genius, of knowledge itself. Under this view no right-minded Hindoo ought to feel his national instincts offended, and his self-respect diminished, by allegiance to a foreign rule. The regeneration of his country must be the dearest object to the heart of every enlightened Hindoo, and it must be perfectly evident to him that the best mode of attaining this end is by striving to raise himself to the level of his rulers. What can the most patriotic Hindoo wish for better than that his country should, until its education as a nation is further advanced, continue part of the greatest and most glorious of empires, under a sovereign of the purest Aryan blood?'

The copper coins still current in the North-West markets are the damrie and dubbul of the Mahomedans. Before the Queen's pice is coined in tenfold quantities, it cannot suffice for circulation in these populous provinces. Cowries are also current, as in Bengal, but on a much more limited scale for their scarcity. The cowrie enters into the fraction of Hindoo arithmetic, and is not likely to go out of vogue till India becomes a thorough bank-note world. The proposed introduction of a paper currency, and Menu's payments in panas, will make the extremes of two ages meet.

The little prevalence of idolatry in Hindoostan,

as

Less Idolatry in Hindoostan than in Bengal. 375

compared with Bengal, has already been dwelt upon in a preceding page. Large towns have their temples and gods. But each village, as in Bengal, has not its tutelary Shiva and Shustee. From Allahabad to Mynporee we have not met with one single instance of that indispensable of a Bengal village-a little round stone painted with vermillion, and placed beneath an aged banyan or peepul tree-which acts as the guardian deity of a rural community. In one single street of Calcutta, there are more images of Krishna and emblems of Shiva, than perhaps in the whole length of the Doab-and this in Bengal, which is at the intellectual headship of India. Travelling like ours may be compared to the run of a horse in a race. Given the distance, and given the time-to finish the career. There is no time to loseno time to look about leisurely-no time to pick up any statistics—no time to inquire into the state of education, the prevalence of crime, or the nature of diseases peculiar to these provinces-no time to visit any of the big folks of the land, and sound their opinions—and no time to view the hut of a peasant, and hear his domestic tale. All these the world now cares to read and know. But on—on we go in a breathless haste, keeping our eyes fixed only upon the goal, and leaving unfulfilled the legitimate duties of a traveller. Ours is seeing 'the world from a gig.'

Saw two Europeans on their way to Agra. They were travelling by an European dawk, and soon outstripped us to justify how everything native stands at a discount. Only three short years ago, how beset were