voices mingles with my perturbed visions. Crowds of natives are collecting for the six o'clock train two hours before sunrise. They talk, chatter, jabber, shout, and laugh to beguile the tedium of waiting, At five minutes to six the station bell rings violently, and my servant appears with my chota haziri, or little breakfast. I start up, dress quickly, remembering that I am expected to drink a cup of hot tea, and go out like a veteran AngloIndian, to eat the air' (hawa khānā), before the sun is well up.

I conform to the spirit of the trite precept Si Romae fueris, Romano vivito more; but the Collector and his wife are out before me, and are seen mounting their horses and starting off to scour the country in every direction for an hour or so. I find the morning breeze bite keenly, and am glad to walk briskly up and down the camp. I amuse myself by watching the gradual gathering of natives around the Kutchery-two or three policemen with a prisoner, a cheerful-looking man in a red turban and white garments carrying a paper or petition of some kind; several emaciated half-naked villagers bowed down to the dust with the weight of their poverty and grievances; a decrepit old man attended by a decrepit old woman; underlings who come to deliver reports or receive instructions; other persons who come to be advised, encouraged, scolded or praised, and others who appear to have nothing to do, and to do it very successfully. Every one has an air of quiet resignation, and nearly all squat on the ground, awaiting the Collector Sahib's return with imperturbable patience. All these cases are disposed of by the Collector in person after our eight o'clock breakfast.

At eleven the post comes in; that is, a running messenger, nearly naked, brings in a pile of letters on his head from the neighbouring town. The Collector is immersed in a sea of papers until our next meal. Meanwhile a visitor from a neighbouring station makes his appearance riding on a camel, and is received in the

drawing-room tent by the Collector's wife. Then a deputation of Brahmans is seen approaching. They have come to greet me on my arrival; some of them are Pandits. A mat is spread for them in a vacant tent. They enter without shoes, make respectful salaams, and squat round me in a semicircle. I thoughtlessly shake hands with the chief Pandit, a dignified venerable old gentleman, forgetful that the touch of a Mlećcha (English barbarian) will entail upon him laborious purificatory ceremonies on his return to his own house. We then exchange compliments in Sanskrit, and I ask them many questions, and propound difficulties for discussion. Their fluency in talking Sanskrit surprises me, and certainly surpasses mine. We English scholars treat Sanskrit as a dead language, but here in India I am expected to speak it as if it were my mother-tongue. Once or twice I find myself floundering disastrously, but the polite Pandits. help me out of my difficulties. Two hours pass away like lightning, the only drawback to general harmony being that all the Pandits try to speak at once. I find that no one thinks of terminating the visit. Native visitors never venture to depart till the Sahib says plainly 'you may go.' I begin to think of the most polite Sanskrit formula for breaking up my conclave, when I am saved from all awkwardness by a call to tiffin.

In the afternoon the sun acquires canicular power, the thermometer rises to eighty-two, and the temperature is about as trying as that of the hottest day of an English summer. Under the combined influence of tiffin, heat, exhilaration, humiliation, and general excitement, I am compelled to doze away an hour or two, till it is time to walk with the Collector to a neighbouring Baoli, or old underground well (called in Gujarātī Wau), now unused and falling into ruins, but well worth a visit. It is more like a small subterranean tank than a well, and the descent to it is by a long flight of stone steps, surrounded by cool stone chambers built of solid masonry, and supported by

handsome pillars. In Eastern countries, benevolent men who have become rich and wish to benefit their fellowcreatures before they die, construct wells and tanks, much as we build hospitals in Europe. I return with the Collector to his camp as the sun sets.

So much for my first day's experiences, which are so vivid that I may be pardoned for having recounted them in the present tense.

THE VILLAGES AND RURAL POPULATION

OF INDIA.

ONE of my first acts after my day's rest in the Collector of Kaira's camp was to visit a neighbouring village called Khātraj.

The organization of Indian villages-meaning by a village not merely a collection of houses, but a rural commune or territorial division of cultivable land—is a highly interesting and instructive study both in its connexion with the early history of the Aryan races, and in its bearing on the present condition of rural society not only in India but in Europe. In no part of the world have the collection of communities which together make up the aggregate of a country's population been left so much to self-government as in India. Its village system is based on the purest form of Home-rule, which had its origin in the simple patriarchal constitution of society, when the family of brothers-joint owners of the family land—lived together and cultivated the soil, as co-partners under a paternal head.

Every Indian village is a collection of such families united in intimate corporate relations. And as each family is held together by a close interdependence of interests under a common father, so the members of each village community are united in close association under a presiding head-man, or chief of some kind. It must be borne in mind that the actual tillers of the ground in an Indian village constitute at least three-fourths of the population.

In Gujarat these cultivators are called Kumbi (Sanskrit Kutumbi). The remaining inhabitants consist of various useful functionaries, artisans and mechanics, to be presently described-men of distinct castes and employments who are indispensable to the maintenance of every society, and minister to its wants in diverse ways.

Of course the detail of rural organization is not uniform in every part of India, nor does the system of self-government prevail with equal force every where. But in every village there is a close intertwining of communal relations, so that the separate existence and independence of any individual of the community is barely recognized.

The Sanskrit name for a village commune is Grāma. It is clear from Manu's law-book that a regular system of village-administration prevailed in some parts of India many centuries before Christ. There was first a supreme village-lord or governor who was called Grāmādhipati and who governed 1000 villages, subject to the king's suzerainty. Under him were the lords of 100 villages constituting a district now called a Parganah, and under these again were the chiefs of each separate village-community. Some similar gradation of administrative authority probably existed long before the time of Manu's code. But the interconnexion between the village system and the state, the nature of the links which have united the higher with the lower power, and the amount of control which the one has exercised over the other, have varied with each change in the Supreme Authority. What has remained unchanged has been the simple self-contained village corporation. This has survived all changes, all political, religious, and physical convulsions-all wars, massacres, pestilences, and famines-in a word, all the external and internal disturbing forces that have swept over and agitated the country for more than three thousand years.

At present, under British rule, the village-overseers, or head-men, have different names in different places, according to their various functions or powers. For example,