in them; but the crop is very precarious, and large fortunes are made and lost--by the planters. * In the evening the women may be seen coming to the wells, with their pitchers on their heads, as in Scripture lands in the days of old.† It is, indeed, one of the pleasures of the traveller to notice the resemblance of many of the everyday habits of the people and incidents of social life, and also some of the features of nature, to those of Palestine, as related in the Bible. The grinding, by couples of women, of the household corn in the revolving stone hand-mill; the watering of the garden by means of the wheel, with buckets which bring up the water as the wheel revolves, and empty it into the channel provided for it; the courtesy of strangers meeting each other on the road; the simplicity of the wayfarer as he journeys; the running of servants before or by the side of their masters, as the latter ride on horseback or in carriage; the treading out of corn by the oxen; the little perchingplace of the garden watchman; the fierce heat of the sun; the beauty and delight of shade; the palm-tree lifting its head by the way, and seen afar off on the horizon: these and many other things remind him of the stories that delighted his childhood, and the allusions of Holy Writ, familiar to his youth; and lend a charm to the dwellings of the natives and the scenery in which they might otherwise be wanting. On Sundays we remain at the encamping ground reached on Saturday; a Divine Service is performed; paradesexcept church parade-are dispensed with; and the day passes quietly away. It is remarkable that many of these, and even those labouring in the fields (doing men's work), are loaded with ornaments. Bangles and anklets of solid brass, of glass, and of lac are, it would seem, everywhere used by these poor slaves of fashion in lieu of the gold and jewellery of their wealthier sisters. † Gen. xxiv. 13; Exod. ii. 16. CHAPTER V. THE MARCH CONTINUED. HAZAREEBAUGH. HE months in Lower Bengal are, we find, somewhat as THE months in Loy cold and foggy, February, change able; March, stormy, dusty, sultry, and trying; April, like March, but "more so"; May-in England the month of the poets, beautiful and joyous-wretched. In June the annual Rains begin, which drizzle and pour, making everything damp, till about October, which is a kind of medley of all the other months. November is the most pleasant month of the year; December, somewhat hot and hazy. Our thoughts turn to England. SONG. O England, dear England! O land of my birth, Though changeful thy clime, and though clouded thy skies, On thy bosom the temples of freedom arise: E'en the homes, the sweet homes, of thy hills and thy plains, O England, dear England! O land of my love! My soul clings to thee wheresoever I rove. Thy daughters are fair as thine own blooming May, And constant as fair, and as innocent, gay; And they pray for the brave, and they honour the wise, O England, dear England! My fathers' and mine! Let art and let science e'er bloom on thy breast; Give thine hand to, and shield with thine arm, the oppressed. Thy faith bears thee on to a glory sublime, THY NAME SHALL BE GREAT IN THE ANNALS OF TIME! On our march--having but a roadless track for our waywe are guided from place to place by a native, taken from the neighbourhood of each successive encampment. Our letters are brought us by the post runners, who, as the name indicates, carry the mails on foot. They, of course, travel day and night (by reliefs), and are accompanied in the hours of darkness by torch-bearers, who light them on their path, and in passing through the jungles try to scare the wild beasts by waving their torches, and shouting and yelling. Yet they are sometimes seized and devoured; and the mails, in most cases, we may suppose, are distributed among the inhabitants of the jungle. Under any circumstances, it is a risky employment, especially in the hot weather and in the rains, and the delivery of letters is unavoidably slow. In the course of a fortnight we reached the Rajmahal Hills, whose feet were once washed by the waves of the Bay of Bengal, though they are now so far inland; for here we have the apex of the Bengal delta. The aspect of the country is extremely wild; the jungle high, thick, and, indeed, in some places, almost impassable,* and probably full of poisonous snakes, as well as formidable quadrupeds.† Some of the Colonel Forrest, in his "Picturesque Tour," states that he found the grass, when standing up on his elephant, and when his head must have been 19 feet above the ground, to be in some places 6 feet higher than his head, with stalks 1 inch in diameter. † Wild elephants were formerly found here. The Cornhill Magazine had an article on the subject a few years ago. It said: "The ravages of the wild elephants were on a large scale, and their extermination formed one of the most important duties of the British officers after the country passed under our rule. Tigers, leopards, and wolves slew their thousands of men and their hundreds of thousands of cattle. But the herd of wild elephants was absolutely resistless, lifting off roofs, pushing down walls, trampling a village under foot as if it were a city of sand which a child had built upon the shore. In two parishes alone, during the last few years of the native administration, fifty-six hamlets, with their surrounding lands, 'had all been destroyed and gone to jungle, caused by the depredations of wild elephants.' Another official return states that forty market villages throughout Birbhum district had been deserted from the same cause. Large reductions had to be made in the land tax, and the East India Company borrowed tame elephants from the native viceroy's stud in order to catch the wild ones. 'I had ocular proof on my journey,' writes an lands in these wilds have been brought into cultivation by sepoy pensioners, to whom Government formerly gave a certain number of acres on their discharge from the army, on condition that they did so. Tigers, leopards, bears, boars, and deer are said to abound here; and several young cubs were brought into camp by the villagers for sale as soon as they were aware of our arrival. Night after night the roar of the tiger, the howl of the hyena, and the bay of the jackal kept us awake. Sentries, however, being posted round the camp, and each one of them keeping up a blazing fire beside him, none dared to come within the flaming circle. Perhaps English officer in 1791, 'of their ravages. The poor timid native ties his cot in a tree, to which he retires when the elephants approach, and silently views the destruction of his cottage and the whole profits of his labour.' 'One night,' writes an English surveyor, in 1810, although I had a guard, the men of the village close to my tent retired to the trees, and the women hid themselves among the cattle, leaving their huts a prey to the elephants, who know very well where to look for grain. Two nights before some of them had unroofed a hut in the village, and had eaten up all the grain which a poor family possessed.' 'Most fortunately for the population of the country,' wrote the greatest elephant-hunter of the last century, 'they delight in the sequestered range of the mountains; if they preferred the plains, whole kingdoms would be laid waste.' All this is now changed. One of the complaints of the modern Englishman in India is that he can so seldom get a shot at a tiger. Wolves are dying out in many provinces; the ancient Indian lion has disappeared. The wild elephant is so rare that he is specially protected by the Government, and in most parts of India he can only be caught by official licence, or under official supervision. Many districts have petitioned for a close season, so as to preserve the edible game still remaining." The numbers of people destroyed by wild beasts constitute an extraordinary feature of Indian life. Rewards are offered by the Government for the killing of these animals, but still the loss of life is very great in some districts, and in others it is less only because goats are abundant, and the wolves prefer kids when they can get them. No less than 14,529 persons lost their lives by snake bites in 1869, and in 1871 there were 18,078 deaths reported as caused by dangerous animals of all classes; but Dr. Fayrer is of opinion that systematic returns would show that there are more than 20,000 deaths annually from snake bites. The inhabitants of the border lands between jungle and cultivation are killed and eaten by tigers in such numbers as to require the serious attention of the Government. A single tigress caused the destruction of 13 villages, and 236 square miles of country were thrown out of cultivation. Another tigress killed 127 people in 1869, and stopped a public road for many weeks. A third killed 108 people in the three years 1867-9. In Lower Bengal alone 13,401 human beings were killed by wild beasts in six years, and 40 in South Canara in the single month of July 1867. The Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces has to report 946 persons killed by tigers in three years ending with 1869. There are difficulties in the way of extirpating tigers: the natives regard the man-eating tiger as a kind of incarnate and spiteful divinity, whom it is dangerous to offend; and, as readers of corre even here some wanderer, his head laid upon a stone, may have visions of angels such as Jacob had of old on his way to Padan-aram. But it is otherwise with those on guard. It is near Christmas time. The youthful sentinel, as he paces his lonely post in the midnight hour, thinks perchance of his schoolboy days, when he learned about the great rivers, the lofty hills, and the broad plains of Hindostan, amid which he now finds himself, and feels (alas!) that he is no longer a boy; or, with emotion, of those in the now distant land of his nativity who gather around the family hearth, and, it may be, speak of him as the vacant chair reminds them of his absence; or, yet more tenderly, of the oft-repeated but lightly esteemed counsels of his father, or the tears of his widowed mother, who by her solitary fireside thinks of him, and weeps and mourns for her son; or perhaps there may be some dear "girl he left behind him," of whom he thinks, and, if he has wronged her, with shame and sorrow. And possibly a tear rolls down the truant's cheek, as he feels that he may never see those loved ones again; that all whom he knew are now lost to him, and that in this land of his self-exile he must now find his grave; or, if he hope that at some distant day he may again tread his native shore, that it must be as a crippled or a prematurely worn-out man; or else as one whose better days have passed, spondence which we published some time ago on the subject will remember, it is the desire of a few in India actually to preserve tigers for sport. Mr. Frank Buckland has suggested an organised destruction of the tiger cubs in the breeding season, and the attraction of full-grown tigers to traps by means of valerian, of which tigers (which are only gigantic cats) are exceedingly fond. According to the latest official returns, which are for 1886, 24,841 persons were killed by wild beasts in that year in British India. Of these, 22,134 were killed by snakes, 928 by tigers, 222 by wolves, 194 by leopards, 113 by bears, 57 by elephants, 24 by hyenas, and 1169 by other animals, including scorpions, jackals, lizards, boars, crocodiles, buffaloes, mad dogs, and foxes. In the same year 57,541 animals were destroyed by wild animals; but in this case the proportions are quite different, for while snakes were responsible for the deaths of eleven-twelfths of the human beings, they only killed two in every 57 animals, tigers and leopards doing the greatest damage. Tigers show 23,769, leopards 22,275, wolves 4275, snakes 2514, hyenas 1312, and bears 758. both of human beings and animals the destruction appears to be on the increase in the former case the number is higher than in any one of the previous ten years, and in the latter it is third in ten years in point of numbers killed. At the same time, the numbers of wild beasts killed and the rewards paid for that purpose are increasing. In 1886, 22,417 wild beasts were destroyed, and 417,596 snakes.—Newspaper Notices. In the case |