The Project Gutenberg eBook, Beast and Man in India, by John Lockwood Kipling

BEAST AND MAN

IN INDIA

A POPULAR SKETCH OF INDIAN ANIMALS
IN THEIR RELATIONS WITH
THE PEOPLE

BY

JOHN LOCKWOOD KIPLING, C.I.E.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

London

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1904

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things."

Walt Whitman.

TO THE OTHER THREE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

When, on the 21st March 1890, under the auspices of the Hon. Sir Andrew Scoble, the Legislative Council of India passed an Act (XI. of 1890) for the prevention of cruelty to animals, some surprise was expressed in England that legislation should be necessary for a people who have long been quoted as an example of mercy. It was hinted that Orientals must have learned cruelty, as they have learned drunkenness, from brutal Britons. Those who know India need not be told that this insinuation is groundless, since both vices have for ages been rooted in the life of Eastern as of all the nations under heaven. The general conclusion of cultivated Europe as to the temper of Orientals towards animals is expressed by Mr. Lecky, in a clause of the sentence with which he concludes a survey of a growth of consideration for animals as an element of public morals, in his History of European Morals from Constantine to Charlemagne, and runs thus: "The Muhammadans and the Brahmans have in this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians."

There is enough truth in this statement to give interest to an examination of it. The gulf that must exist between religious prescriptions that have earned a world-wide reputation for mercy and a practice which has led a Government, strongly adverse to unnecessary legislation, to frame an enactment for the prevention of cruelty, deserves looking into. We ought, perhaps, to distrust most of the compendious phrases which presume to label our complex and paradoxical humanity with qualities and virtues, like drugs in a drawer. At all events, it is better not to try to make another rule but to offer a few general considerations and details of actual fact, leaving the Christian to frame his summary for himself.

The wholesale ascription of tender mercy to India may not unfairly be held to be part of a wide and general misconception of Indian life and character, of which the administrator, the schoolmaster, and the missionary have reason to complain. They find on closer acquaintance that both Hindus and Muhammadans are more human and more like the rest of the world than the conventional pictures of Scholars, working from a dead and done-with literature, had led them to expect. Some of the most authoritative of these writers have never ventured to disturb their dreams by contact with the living India of to-day, and their gushing periods have, in consequence, as much actuality as Gulliver's Travels. For nearly all, the last few centuries of this era do not exist. To judge from their writings, the English power in India might have succeeded that of the Gupta kings. No mention is made of the horrible hole of the pit from which the country was digged; and the events that really shaped the character and habits of the people are ignored in favour of ancient law-givers and forgotten Vedas. Nothing could be more scholarly, amiable, sentimental, or mistaken, and the plain result is a falsification of history which has more ill effects than are visible on the narrow horizon of an English study.

It is not a pleasant subject to dwell upon, but there is no more fitting adjective than "cruel" for the India of the late Mogul and the Pindāri. We may allow that through centuries of trouble the Hindu system availed to preserve Brahmanical ordinances, but these only affected a limited portion of the community. The masses of the people, who really have to do with animals, could not but be demoralised. So general precepts of mercy for the many shrank into ritual observances for the few. Moreover, such precepts as exist have been exaggerated in report.

Strictly speaking, the Parsee religious code alone, among those of Oriental races, directly enjoins a humane and considerate treatment of all animals during their life, as may be fully learned from the Book of Ardha Viraf, the Dante of the Zoroastrian Inferno. The Hindu worships the cow, and as a rule is reluctant to take the life of any animal except in sacrifice. But that does not preserve the ox, the horse, and the ass from being unmercifully beaten, over-driven, over-laden, under-fed, and worked with sores under their harness; nor does it save them from abandonment to starvation when unfit for work, and to a lingering death which is made a long torture by birds of prey, whose beaks, powerless to kill outright, inflict undeserved torment. And the same code which exalts the Brahman and the cow, thrusts the dog, the ass, the buffalo, the pig, and the low-caste man beyond the pale of merciful regard.

The loving-kindness of which we hear is, in modern fact and deed, a vague reluctance to take life by a positive sudden act, except for sacrifice,—a large exception,—and a ceremonial reverence for the cow, which does not avail to secure even for her such good treatment as the milch cows of Europe receive. There are some castes who hold it wrong even to accidentally destroy an insect, who keep a cloth before their mouths to prevent swallowing them, and who brush the ground before they seat themselves, so that they may not crush out some minute life. But they teach no gospel of mercy, inheriting only an observance of their peculiar caste, absolutely inert beyond its boundaries. Indeed, it is well for mankind that they are not propagandists, for, clearly a man who refuses to take or to interfere with animal life in any way, and who says that while the cat should be left to kill the mouse, the serpent should not by a truly pious man be prevented from entering the cradle of his sleeping child, is not a teacher of much value. No general temper of pity towards animals in service has been produced by Brahmanical law, and probably not by any merely religious ordinances in any part of the world. Feeling for the sufferings of animals, restraint in their use, and recognition of their rights to consideration, are just as modern in India as elsewhere.

The reluctance to kill, which is the main fact of Hindu animal treatment, is of itself, from a European point of view, a cause of needless suffering. We speak of putting injured or diseased creatures out of their misery. To the mind of the orthodox Hindu there is no such thing as euthanasia, and it is impious to attempt to bring it about. An English correspondent of the Pioneer, 30th October 1890, writes:—

"At Chandi, near Kalka, I last week found a Government dāk horse lying in a public grove, close to the road, a hind leg of which had been broken (according to the people there) three days before, through a kick. This poor beast had been hauled out and thrown down alive to die a lingering death. It was perfectly conscious. I found it surrounded by crows, which had already picked out both of its eyes, and when I arrived were in the act of devouring other tender parts. The horse attracted my attention by throwing its head up repeatedly to drive the crows off. Luckily I had a pistol, and of course shot the animal at once."

There is nothing unusual in this, for it is the fate of all animals that serve the Hindu to be left to die; and though most English people would approve of that pistol-shot, it was wrong according to the Hindu canon.

The cause of the canon is not far to seek. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls is at the root of ahimsa, the ancient principle of regard for animals, for it makes all living nature kin with humanity. A bull is more than a bull, he is a potential grandfather. We have all been here before, and the souls of the hosts of men and animals, birds, and fishes have passed in these various disguises through infinite æons of time and change. Believing this, you naturally hold your hand before dismissing a soul to another flight and another change of dwelling.

In this, as in other Indian subjects, a vast and most various population has been labelled with attributes that belong to a few of the upper classes alone. A description of the habits and beliefs of the Bench of Bishops would scarcely be accepted as fairly representative of the masses of Great Britain, but something like this suffices for popular estimates of India. Those who have but little to do with animals are enjoined not to kill, but no command is laid on the low-caste Hindu, while the average Muhammadan, ignorant though devout, knows of none. Even Hindus are not, as is commonly believed, universally vegetarian. Nearly all eat fish, vast and yearly increasing numbers eat mutton and kid, Rajputs and Sikhs eat wild boar, and most low-caste Hindus are only vegetarian when flesh food is not within their reach. All Muhammadans are flesh eaters as a matter of course. A Levitical code is naturally a mother of hypocrisy, so Hindus living among Hindus of higher caste will call mutton lal sâg—red vegetable; and fish, water beans; while prawns are ennobled as Shiva biscuits, but they are eaten all the same.

Animal sacrifices, and the peculiar character of the religious ceremonies of certain Hindu Sâkti worshipping castes, at whose meetings the eating of flesh and the drinking of wine and spirits form part of a ritual of orgy, also tend to lower the standard from the ideal Europeans have conceived of the Hindu. There are vast numbers of these "left-hand" worshippers. Here it may be remarked that the "official" books of mythology, etc., are no guide to modern practice, or to a comprehension of modern life. Modern Hinduism, as Sir Monier M. Williams has well said, is "a loose conglomerate," and it is a conglomerate in process of decay and change. The High Gods described in the works one may call "official" may not be quite dead, but they are practically superseded in favour of witchcraft, demonolatry, and fetishism, or by vulgar manifestations, usually of an orgiastic type. Wholesale slaughter and blood are constantly associated with these Gods, Godlings, and demons. Some writers claim for Hinduism a wonderful immutability; and this preposterous contention, which would be scouted if made on behalf of any other race of mankind, has been allowed to pass unchallenged. It has decay inherent in its system, and its history is one long chronicle of protest, dissent, and change.

Persons of the Vegetarian persuasion sometimes claim a moral superiority for the Hindu, in that his delicacy of feeling is not blunted by the horrors of the Western butcher's shop. This is plausible but illusory, for there are plenty of butchers' shops in India, and it should be further remembered that of the thousands who habitually pass such shops in the West, but a very small percentage have seen the act of slaughter, wherein demoralising influence may be supposed to lie. The Hindu, on the other hand, is familiar with slaughter in a most revolting form, performed as an act of sacrifice. When we talk of sacrifice we think of the grave and decent solemnities described in the Bible or in Homer. Such ideas are rudely dispelled by the reality in India. The goat and buffalo sacrifices to Kali at Kali ghât in the highly civilised metropolis of Bengal are not to be mentioned in connection with any slaughtering we know of, for there may be seen thousands of people gloating in delirious excitement over rivers of blood.

There are general injunctions of mercy in the Buddhist religion, but Buddhism has been dead and done with in India proper for centuries, and has left but little behind it. Always vague and abstract, it is doubtful whether its languid prescriptions ever effectively controlled the daily practice of the people. The Singhalese are Buddhists, and yet cruelty to animals is one of the marks of modern Ceylon. The modern Burman is a Buddhist and should not take life. But, like Gautama Buddha himself, he eats flesh, so he contents his conscience by calling the butcher a Muhammadan. We are apt to judge of the results of a creed from the aims of its commandments, which is putting the cart before the horse. Yet we ought to know better, for the main stress of our Christian commandment is to lay up no treasure on earth, to consider the lilies of the field, to sell all and follow the Christ, etc. etc. In the Christian capitals of the Western world one may see how much of this injunction is obeyed.

The ordinary Englishman will not easily be persuaded that the act of killing an animal or bird for food is necessarily a proof of cruelty. I write these lines in an English house in the country, the gracious lady whereof has just returned from a visit to some friends in the village, who had sent word that their pig was killed. Here is a delicate and refined Englishwoman going in cold blood to see a dead pig! Nothing could be more horrible from a Hindu or Muhammadan point of view, but from that of English country life it is natural enough. The lady is a valued friend of a struggling family. Their pig has been kindly treated and carefully fed for months, and its death is a sort of festival; they are proud of its weight and size, and it is one of the triumphs of their provident and thrifty lives. "And the pig?" says the master of the house at lunch. "Well, I had to look at the pig, and it seemed a fine pig enough. They said it weighed 14 score, and I said it must be the largest they had fed since their mother died, and they were all much pleased, and wanted to tell me stories of past pigs, but I managed to escape."

The topsy-turvy morality of the East would give a higher place to the Levitically clean Hindu, who would die sooner than eat flesh, but who would also rather die than touch or help a dying man of a low caste near his door, than to the English lady whose life is spent in active beneficence, but who is defiled by eating beef and approaching the dead body of a pig.

The animal hospitals of India have been frequently quoted, and with some reason, as a proof of the tender mercy of the country. There are three of these interesting institutions on the great continent, at Bombay, Surat, and Ahmedabad, chiefly maintained by Banians of the Jain faith. The Bombay "pinjrapol," however, is said to have been largely endowed by the generous Parsee, Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, first baronet of the name. They are not hospitals in the true sense, for ailments are not treated, but simply refuges for halt, maimed, diseased, and blind creatures for whom nobody cares. Until the late Mr. J. H. Steel, Principal of the Bombay Veterinary College, took compassion on the inmates and regularly visited the place, no attempt had ever been made to alleviate their sufferings; and the institution is of some antiquity. Ritual reverence for life does not include the performance of acts of mercy. It is enough to save the animal from immediate death, and to place food within its reach. So you see there creatures with unset broken limbs, with hoofs eighteen inches long, and monstrous wens. The dogs, as I remember them twenty years ago, were a heartbreaking sight, confined, with nothing to do but fight, insufficiently fed, and all afflicted with one equal misery of mange. A quaint feature of the place is an apartment supposed to be full of the vermin that feed on mankind. From time to time a man is paid to spend a night in this den in order to give the cherished insects a dinner, but first he is drugged to insensibility, lest in his natural irritation he should be tempted to destroy some of them. I have always doubted this, and certainly never saw it done, but it is one of the proudest traditions of the "pinjrapol," vouched for by Native gentlemen of undoubted authority.

There are admirable points in the ritual respect for life, but it is not true humanity, nor is it practised with sufficient intelligence or feeling to profit the animal. We in the West may at least learn from it the reflection that all living things cling to life, nor need we in the present state of Veterinary science be always so prompt with pistol or poleaxe as is our habit.

But it must be noted that the sect which cares for animal hospitals is comparatively small, with only a local influence, and that its practice in this matter is the subject of a good deal of popular gibe. For it is not easy to respect people who collect caterpillars, and feed fleas and other vermin with human blood, nor is it only to the Occidental that a fantastic glorification of the letter of a law may show the death of its spirit.

Oriental tender mercy has always been liable to this taint of grotesque exaggeration. That renowned model of kindness and generosity, whose name is on every Oriental's lips, and whose deeds are constantly quoted—Hatim Tai—fed his brother the tiger (as St. Francis of Assisi would say) with portions of flesh cut from his own limbs. This may be heroic, but, like many other illustrious examples of Oriental goodness, it is also absurd, and so remote from every possibility of ordinary life and conduct as to exert no practical influence as a lesson.

Yet, while maintaining that no precept of mercy has protected animals in servitude in India, we may gladly admit that a more humane temper prevails with regard to free creatures than in the West. Village boys are not there seen stoning frogs or setting dogs at cats, nor tying kettles to dogs' tails, and it has not been found necessary to forbid bird-nesting by Act of Parliament. The Indian schoolboy on his way to school passes numbers of squirrels, much resembling the chipmunk of America, but he never throws a stone at them; and the sparrow, the crow, the maina, and the hoopoe move from his path without a flutter of fear. The india-rubber catapult or tweaker of the West has not yet reached him, while the sling and the golél or pellet-bow (the "stone bow" of Shakspeare) seem to be only used when guarding fruit and crops from the hungry parrakeet and the omnivorous crow.

One of the most surprising things in the country is the patience with which depredations on the crops are endured. With far less provocation the English farmer organises sparrow clubs, and freely uses the gun, the trap, and the poisoned bait. And the Indian farmer suffers from creatures that earn no dole of grain by occasional insecticide. The monkey, the nilghai, the black buck, the wild pig, and the parrakeet fatten at his expense, and never kill a caterpillar or a weevil in return. He and his family spend long and dismal hours on a platform of sticks raised a few feet above the crops, whence they lift their voices against legions of thieves. The principle of abstaining from slaughter is pushed to an almost suicidal point in purely Hindu regions, and becomes a serious trouble at times. A large tract of fertile country in the N.-W. Provinces, bordering on the Bhurtpore State, is now lapsing into jungle on account of the inroads of the nilghai and the wild pig. The "blue cow" or nilghai is sacred, and may not be killed even by the villagers whom the creature drives from their homes, and there are not enough sportsmen or tigers to keep down the wild boar.

Gardeners try to scare the birds with elaborate arrangements of string, bamboos, old pans, and stones in their fruit trees; and sometimes a watcher sits like a spider at the centre of an arrangement of cords, radiating all over the field, so that an alarming movement may be produced at any point. Yet their tempers do not give way, and they preserve a monumental patience. Sometimes they say: "The peacock, the monkey, the deer, the partridge, these four are thieves," or include other animals and birds with varying numbers, but always with more resignation than resentment. The wisdom of the village says that public calamities are seven, and are visitations of God,—drought, floods, locusts, rats, parrots, tyranny, and invasion. The professional birdcatcher, however, is never of the farmer race, and owes his victims no revenge; while a scornful proverb on his ragged and disreputable condition shows that he earns no gratitude from the cultivator. Another rustic saying about bird slaughter, expanded into its full meaning, would run: "You kill a paddy-bird, and what do you get?—a handful of feathers!" Yet since Parisian milliners have decreed that civilised women shall wear birds in their head-gear, there is not sufficient respect for animal life to stay the barbarous slaughter of them now going on all over India.

The tolerance or indifference which leaves wild creatures alone is unfortunately an intimate ally of blank ignorance. That townspeople should be ignorant of nature is to be expected, but even in the country a fly-catcher, a sparrow, and a shrike are all spoken of as chiriyas, birds merely, and not one in fifty, save out-caste folk, can tell you anything of their habits, food, nests, or eggs. The most vague and incorrect statements are accepted and repeated without thought, a habit common to all populations, but more firmly rooted in India than elsewhere. First-hand observation and accurate statement of fact seem almost impossible to the Oriental, and education has not hitherto availed to help him. In the West public instruction becomes more real and vital year by year, but in the East it is still bound hand and foot to the corpse of a dead literature. Educational authorities in India discern the fault, but they are themselves mainly of the literary caste and direct native Professors whose passion is for words. We talk of science teaching, but forget to count with a national habit of mind that stands carefully aloof from facts and is capable of reducing the splendid suggestions of Darwin and Wallace, Faraday and Edison, to mechanical and inert rote work.

Indifference is intensified by the narrowness of sympathy produced by the caste system, and by the discouragement of attachment to animals among respectable people. Our modern school-books, in which lessons on animal life and humane animal treatment are wisely included, may do something in the course of time to lighten this "blind side" of Oriental character, and in a few generations we may hope for an Indian student of natural history. At present this splendid field is left entirely to European observers, who mostly look at nature along the barrel of a gun. Which is a false perspective.

I conclude that, while admitting the need for a legislative measure for the protection of animals, consonant with the wishes and feelings of the most cultivated classes in India, and of itself a sign of advancing civilisation and morality, it would be a task as difficult as hateful to prove that the people at large have any abnormal and inborn tendency to cruelty. The shadow of evil days of anarchy, disorder, and rapine has but lately cleared away and given place to an era of security, when, as the country proverb says, "the tiger and the goat drink at one ghât." The people are better than their creeds, but it is not easy to defend their practice, though it is often more due to necessity, custom, and ignorance than to downright brutality of intent.

To explain something of this in a familiar manner befitting an everyday, familiar subject is the purpose of this pen and pencil essay. It has seemed to me that an elementary study of Indian animals, their treatment and usage, and the popular estimates and sayings current about them, though involving much that is commonplace and trivial, opens a side door into Indian life, thought, and character, the threshold of which is still unworn.

To Anglo-Indians of long standing a word of apology is due for the apparent confidence with which native beliefs are treated. The truth is, it is hard to state briefly ideas of this nature without a seeming assumption of complete knowledge. But they will recognise the difficulty of translating nebulous Indian notions into stark English print, and make just allowances. We others know that only a fool will pretend to say with absolute confidence what a native thinks. Even in the West, where men think aloud, and the noisy newspaper proclaims the matter on the house-top, it takes a wise man to say how the popular mind is working.

India has a larger inheritance than most other countries in sacred and legendary lore of animals; but much of it has now only a literary interest, and but a remote connection with the actual life of the people. I have neither the scholarship nor the ambition to produce "one of those learned compilations which have no root in actual life, epitomise the past, and have no future." Serious students of Zoolatry and of folk-lore in its scientific sense will therefore find little to interest them in chapters wherein a living dog is frankly preferred to a dead lion.

BIRD SCARING

CHAPTER II

OF BIRDS

"Birds, companions more unknown
Live beside us, but alone;
Finding not, do all they can,
Passage from their souls to man.
Kindness we bestow, and praise,
Laud their plumage, greet their lays;
Still, beneath the feather'd breast,
Stirs a history unexpress'd."

Matthew Arnold.

he Parrot.—The parrakeet (Palæornis eupatrius) is in some regions believed to have earned the gratitude of man by its services in bringing the seeds of fruit and grain from the garden of Paradise after the Flood and sowing them abroad on the earth for his use. Ages of shameless larceny have nearly effaced the memory of that fabled feat, but the creature is still tolerated, and is the familiar bird of the fields and groves as well as the favourite cage bird of India.

The parrot plays a leading part in many folk tales, and has thus come to be regarded as a guardian of domestic honour. In such ballads as "Lord William" and "May Colvine and fause Sir John," the popinjay's share in romance is shown to British readers as a curious survival, but in India we are nearer to the time when creatures spoke and thought, and the literary curiosity of the West is still the belief of the East. The parrot is also reckoned an auspicious or lucky bird to have in the house. An augmentation of honour is its appointment as the vâhan or steed of Kama or Kamdeo, a Hindu god of love.

Unfortunately for its comfort, it has a powerful beak, and quickly destroys a wooden cage. So it is usually confined in a small dome-shaped cage of hoop-iron with an iron floor. During the hot season, when it is painful to touch any metal surface, these cages must be cruel torture-chambers; and when one watches the free birds darting to and fro like live emeralds in the sun, with the wild scream and reckless flinging of themselves on the air peculiar to parakeets, one cannot but grieve for the captive slowly roasting in his tiny oven-like prison. Leaving the general question that is sure to arise some day as to our right to imprison creatures for our pleasure at all, the confinement we inflict should be at least as little irksome as possible; but it is hard to persuade people that creatures have rights, and a polite smile is the only answer to a plea for these prisoners.

THE PARROT'S CAGE

Hindus teach their pet birds the sacred words, Gunga Rām, Rama, and Sri Bhugwān, names of God, grateful to the Hindu ear and easy to parrot speech, while Muhammadans say Miān Mittū, which is only a caressing name from the vast vocabulary of endearing nonsense in which Indian domestic life excels. In Northern India a household parrot verse among Hindus is:

Latpat, panchhi, chatur Sujān
Sub-ka dada Sri Bhugwān
Parho Gunga Rām!

or roughly in English: "Pretty bird, clever and knowing, God is the giver of all; say Gunga Rām!" The word here translated "say" means to read or study, and also to recite aloud, and is constantly used for bird song. "My lark is reading very nicely this morning," a bird-fancier will say. "Little parrot" is a pet name for children, and "parrot talk" is a woman's expression for their conversation when it is pretty and respectful.

"Parrot eyed" is a common phrase for an ungrateful or deceitful person, not, as might be imagined, from the expression of the bird's eyes, but because, after years of cherishing, it will fly away if the cage door is left open. In spite of the opinion of my native friends, I cannot help thinking the phrase was derived originally from the parrot's habit of not looking at the person he is supposed to be talking to; for when one thinks of it, a parrot's eyes have always a curiously indifferent and "other-where" kind of expression. A certain type of face is well described in "a mouth like a purse, a nose like a parrot's." As a hero of song and story this bird takes part in some domestic observances. A mother will on several consecutive days divide an almond between her parrot and her baby. This will prevent the child from stammering, and make it bold and free of speech. In the Punjab Himálaya there is a whimsical superstition that when a parrot's cage hangs over the door whence a bridegroom issues to be married, it is highly auspicious, but that something dreadful will happen if he passes under it on any other errand. This fancy once caused some trouble to a political officer of Government in charge of a Hill State. The youthful Raja was to be married, and on the eve of the event, while there was still much business to be done, he was inveigled into the zenana, or feminine side of the palace, the inmates of which promptly hung a parrot over the door. It was necessary, for many and urgent reasons, to withdraw the boy from his female relatives; but the little council of the State was sorely puzzled. It would be an awful thing to make the Raja pass under the cage. Could he not be brought out by some other door behind, or even fished up through a hole made in the roof? At last a grave old Wazir came in and asked with an innocent air: "Is it quite certain that the cage is there?" It was quite certain. "Then," said the old gentleman slily, "my eyes are dim, for I did not see it as I passed but now." The Council went to see, were greatly relieved to find the cage gone, and made a great pretence of wondering how it came about. While they were deliberating with characteristic Hindu hesitation and timidity, he had ordered a menial, indifferent to omens, to carry it off. So the young Raja was rescued from his factious women folk and came out.

The parrakeet is often trained as a public performer. In the streets of Delhi I used to see one that went through gymnastic and military exercises, whirling a tiny torch lighted at each end, loading and firing a small cannon, lying dead and coming to life again; all done with a comic air of eagerness and enjoyment which it seemed hard to impute to mere hunger for the morsels that rewarded each trick. It is seldom a bird in native hands speaks really well. Orientals are easily contented, and, though they can take pains in some matters, are inclined to think that parrot speech comes, as Dogberry said of reading and writing, by nature. The Indian bird, moreover, has less natural aptitude for speech than the true parrots of other countries.

A PERFORMING PARROT

The British soldier in India, at a loss how to employ his leisure, is frequently a butterfly-collector or a bird-fancier. Sometimes a stalwart trooper may be seen all alone, leaning over the parapet of a well, apparently in earnest converse with some one who has fallen in. Parrots are believed to learn to talk more readily when taught in a darkened and silent room. There are no such rooms in his barracks, so the soldier lets his cage half-way down a well and spends hours in teaching his pet. The practice is probably an indigenous one, but I have never seen a native engaged in it.

The Baya Bird.—As a performer of tricks, however, the parrakeet is excelled by the little baya, the weaver bird (Ploceus baya). The plumage of this clever creature is of quaker-like simplicity, but it is a favourite cage-bird and easily acquires tricks, especially of a "fetch and carry" nature. The table servant or waiter of a friend of mine has one that flies to a tree at the word of command, selects a flower or leaf, plucks it, and, returning, places it daintily between its master's lips. Some thread beads with great dexterity, others draw up seed or water, like the European goldfinch; but, judging from the skilful construction of its nest, it is probably more intelligent than the goldfinch. A popular rhyming proverb contrasts the housebuilding talent of the baya bird with the helplessness of the shelterless monkey, which, having human hands and feet, is yet incapable of protecting itself against the weather. This verse is often quoted for the benefit of idle boys and girls who object to learn. The baya is believed to light up its nest at night with captured fire-flies, stuck against the fibrous wall over the head of the brooding hen. The bird certainly catches flies, and pellets of clay are occasionally found stuck on the inside of the nest, but further evidence is wanted before one can do more than envy the unquestioning belief of the Oriental in a charming fancy which may be true.

It is true that at nesting time play nests are made with a loop across the opening, on which the birds play and the male sits and sings to solace the female. Some say these are experimental or preliminary studies in the art of nest-weaving.

A BIRD-SINGING MATCH (DELHI ARTISANS)

Caged Song Birds.—Working people in the cities of Northern India are great bird-fanciers, and find, as they sit for hours over their embroidery, weaving, or shoe-making, that a singing bird is good company. The bulbul (Molpastes intermedius), the chendūl or tufted lark (Galerita cristata), the Shāmā (Cittocincla macrura), the hill maina (Eulabes religiosa), are most commonly seen, and there are several others. Like the operatives of manufacturing England, Indian workmen arrange singing matches between their birds, and enjoy sitting in groups in shady places round the cages in which their pets are shrilling their loudest notes. It is a cruel rule among them that a bird to sing well must be kept always in the dark. I have heard a lark-fancier say that the cage holding a good lark should have a fresh cloth cover every year—the old ones being allowed to remain. The hill maina, one of the best talking birds, however, is generally allowed to look about him; and the tiny lals or male avadavats (Sporœginthus amandava), kept mainly for their minute prettiness, a dozen or more in a cage together, are not covered up except at night as a protection against mosquitoes. In Delhi bird-fanciers often take their birds out tied to a small crutch-shaped perch of bright brass carried in the hand. It is curious that precisely the same practice obtains in Pekin, where hundreds of grave Chinamen may be seen, each carrying a small bird. In the English midland counties linnets and bull-finches are occasionally tied to perches and known as "braced birds."

Fighting Birds.—These Arcadian enjoyments are too simple for many tastes, so bulbuls, quails, partridges, and even the small avadavats are encouraged to fight. Twenty-five rupees is by no means an unusual price for a fighting quail, and in Hyderabad (Deccan), the capital of the Nizam, a hundred and fifty rupees is often given for a good bird. Besides the gray partridge (Ortygornis pondicerianus), which is the best fighting bird, the chikōre (Caccabis chukor) and the black partridge (Francolinus vulgaris) are kept as pets. The house-kept artisan goes out in the cool of the morning or evening, carrying his cage with him, and in some garden or open place releases his bird for a run. The creature follows its master with a rapid and pretty gait that suggests a graceful girl tripping along with a full skirt well held up. The Indian lover can pay his sweetheart no higher compliment than to say she runs like a partridge. In poetry the semblance is one of the most hackneyed of Indian metaphors. In poetry, too, the partridge is associated with the moon, and, like the lotus, is supposed to be perpetually longing for it, while the chikōre is said to eat fire.

Indian house-wives dislike the quail, and it is by some considered an inauspicious bird to keep; but the partridge, in spite of the taint of blackguardism attached to fighting birds, is thought lucky, for he attracts to himself any ill luck that may be hovering about the house,—a function of most Indian household pets. When treated merely as house pets and allowed to run free at times, partridges develop a good deal of intelligence and become entertaining companions, as they are inquisitive, pugnacious, and perfectly fearless. In cities where there are large populations of artisans and many Muhammadans, as Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Hyderabad (Deccan), Agra, Cawnpore, etc., quail and partridge fighting is as popular a diversion as cock-fighting used to be in England, and large sums are betted on their contests. No artificial spurs, however, are worn by Indian birds.

The great London bird market, I am told, now that the "Dials" have disappeared, is St. Martin's Lane on a Sunday morning. In most Indian towns there are bird-dealers, and in some, as at Lucknow, there is a regularly established bird bazaar, where all kinds of birds are sold,—quails, cocks, and partridges for fighting, hawks for the chase, fancy pigeons, singing and talking birds, and others for pets. The variety is much greater than in any European bird market, yet there is a family likeness among bird-fanciers everywhere. A Spitalfields weaver or a Staffordshire potter, if he could speak the language, would find himself quite at home with Indian bird folk in all details of handling, feeding, bargaining, and swapping, and in most appreciations of bird points.

What Birds say.—Good Muhammadans think the black partridge pious, since its call fits itself to the words "Sobhān teri qŭdrăt"—"Thine, O Lord, is the power"; but more worldly ears distinguish the words "Lăssăn, piāz, ădhrăk"—"Garlic, onions, ginger"; or, according to some, "Nūn, tel, ădhrăk,"—"salt, oil, ginger," the chief condiments of curry. The Indian ring-dove (Turtur risorius) is similarly endeared to Muhammadans by its pious persistence in the cry "Yusuf ku"—"Joseph is in the well," which it first raised when the wicked brethren said he was slain and showed the grieving Jacob the blood-stained coat of many colours. Another dove is thought to say "Allah! Allah!" The partridge says "Fakiri Fakiri." A wild pigeon is thought to repeat "Haq sirr hu"—"God knows the secret"; the ordinary rooster exhorts the thoughtless to remember God by crowing—"Zikr' ullah! Zikr' ullah! ya ghafīlin!" while the raven hoarsely cries "Ghâr, Ghâr," as he did when he basely tried to betray Muhammad hidden in the cave of Jebel Thaur to his enemies the Khoreish, when the pious pigeon built her nest and the spider stretched her webs across the entrance. It is quite easy to hear these words in birds' notes—when you know them—and they are at least as much like the original sounds as the renderings of those scientific ornithologists who have tried to express bird music in syllables. In the notes to Mr. Lane's Arabian Nights are given versions of bird talk as they strike Arab ears, with wondrous instances of learned parrots, including one which knew the Qurân right through and corrected a misreading!

The Hoopoe.—Other birds are prized for the legends with which they are associated. The hoopoe (Upupa epops) has not much to say, but he is a favourite because he was King Solomon's messenger; and he is known as the king of birds from the story of his crest and crown, which, perhaps, is not too hackneyed to be repeated here. One hot day King Solomon, travelling on his angel-borne magic carpet, was oppressed by the heat of the sun, and the hoopoes flew over his head, wing to wing in a close and protecting canopy. Solomon was grateful, and promised to grant whatever boon the hoopoes thought fit to ask. They foolishly asked to be allowed to wear golden crowns like his. The great king granted their request, and presently all the bird-catchers in the country were enriched by the spoil of dead hoopoes. A remnant escaped and ruefully prayed for the removal of the dangerous distinction. So the crest of feathers was given instead, and the bird-catchers ceased from troubling. If you suggest to a native that the hoopoe's crest may serve as "the other end" of the pickaxe-like beak, and point out its balancing action as the bird drives it into the ground, he listens and assents, but his assent informs you he has no great opinion of your sense.

THE FAMILIAR CROW

The Crow.—The Indian crow (Corvus splendens) acts as a messenger in many folk stories, and is still supposed to announce approaching visitors. In a land where the pitris or spirits of the dead are believed to be flitting round continually, seeking rest, and inhabiting the bodies of animals and birds, it is easy to imagine the bold and familiar crow haunting houses, peering into windows and doors, a restless human ghost. They are often fed as a propitiation to spirit land. In this belief it is said that a pair of crows were carried to that imperfectly quenched cinder heap, Aden, forty years ago, by the Hindu labourers engaged on the fortifications there. A Hindu who saw them says: "The poor creatures had no trees on which to perch, and they wandered about from rock to rock cawing piteously." It is firmly believed, and there is more ground for the belief than usual, that crows hold punchayets, caste-councils or committees, and inflict summary punishments on offenders. It is at least certain that in India, as elsewhere, a maimed or disabled bird, unable to escape or hide himself, is set upon by his kind and killed. I once had for pensioner a lame crow, outcast from his fellows, but strong enough to take care of himself. This habit is reported to have suggested a stratagem by which omnivorous gypsy folk catch crows. A live crow is spread-eagled on his back, with forked pegs holding down his pinions. He flutters and cries, and other crows come to investigate his case and presently attack him. With claws and beak he seizes an assailant and holds him fast. The gypsy steps from hiding, and secures and pinions the second crow. These two catch two more, the four catch four more, and so on, until there are enough for dinner, or to take into a town, where the crow-catcher stands before some respectable Hindu's shop and threatens to kill the bird he holds in his hand. The Hindu pays a ransom of a pice or two and the crow is released.

CALF AND CROWS

When a child is sick, crows and other birds are bought by its mother and female relatives to be released as a propitiation.

No decent person, of course, would dine on crows, but in Northern India the rook is held to be halāl or permitted for Mussulman food, and I have seen them exposed for sale in Peshawar market.

In Bombay, rude street boys call Parsees "crows"—possibly a gibe at the Parsee custom of exposing the dead in the Towers of Silence, where they are eaten by birds.

Of many sayings about the crow it may be noted that for the daw in peacock's feathers, they say in India of a fop, "the crow stuck a pomegranate flower in his tail and thought himself a mighty swell." Also, "the crow swaggered like a swan, forgetting his own gait." A crow fairy or pĕri is a very dark woman. "Krishna's name in a crow's mouth!" and "Though you put a crow in a parrot's cage he will still caw" express his inferiority. Crows and herons are counted wicked birds; the former being considered the more accomplished rascals.

But the main fact about the crow is his note, which is a ceaseless obligato accompaniment to all Indian life. A popular cradle song crooned over thousands of children—Aré koko, ja re koko = O crow! go crow—might be paraphrased thus—

"Crow, crow! silence keep,
Plums are ripe in jungle deep;
Fetch a bushel fresh and cheap
For a babe who wants to sleep.

"Crow, crow! the peacock cries,
In the wood a thief there lies,
Would steal my baby from my eyes."

Also, they say to a child, "If you make a noise, the crow will fly away with you." The baby-name, or rather women's name, for crow is koko.

All over the world women are apt at "stringing pretty words that make no sense, and kissing full sense into empty words," but, while acknowledging the elemental rightness of "woman talk" as a thing apart and a portion of the God-given sweetness of life, it is not too fantastical to perceive in the Indian development of something like a separate language,—chhoti boli—literally little talk,—the clipped and childish speech of imprisoned women of starved intellect, an evidence of a great social disability. Affection, common sense, and wit may be and are freely expressed in this talk, and it is passing rich in endearments, but to those who look below the surface, it is one sign more of the disadvantage under which the country is laid by the unnatural treatment, denial of instruction, and seclusion of women. Yet, if the women of India have the faults of an exaggerated domesticity, they have also its qualities, and their estate should be understood before reformers rush to meddle with it.

To most Indian women crows stand as types of knavery, and there is sound reason for this estimate. They are thieves, outcast scavengers, deceitful, and, above all other creatures that hoard and hide, clever in concealing things. "The swan (noble type) has flown away, the tiger (the king) has made the crow (the knave) his minister," is a much-quoted verse from a popular tale. Some intimacy with the bird is needed before one can fairly appreciate this side of his character. I once reared from the nest a pair of hill crows,—ravens in all but size,—who lived with me for three years, till one after the other they were wooed away to mate. They were miracles of naughtiness, delighting in sly destruction and odd turns of malice, ever ready to peck at a servant's hurrying heel, and especially given to torment a little dog who hated them. When he had a bone they came daintily stepping together and concerted measures against him, exactly like the stage villains of melodrama, manœuvring and skirmishing with keen enjoyment. On his part, the dog learned to watch and rifle their hiding-places. Their delight in bright objects was remarkable. The spoon in my early morning tea, taken in the garden or verandah, was of even more interest to them than my buttered toast, and they were never tired of tugging at my watch-chain in order to get out the watch, a deeply coveted plaything. Everything of this shining sort that came within reach was promptly buried, dug up again, reburied with elaborate precautions, and forgotten after a few days. In the hot weather they vastly enjoyed eating and playing with pieces of ice, which they hid for future use. But ice is a treasure fleeting as fairy gold, and the birds showed by the fussy action, sidelong squints, and interrogative turns of the head which make them such diverting comedians, how deeply they were puzzled by its disappearance. "Surely, surely," one would seem to say as he turned up a corner of the matting, "I hid a cold chunk of shining stuff here,—but where is it? Never mind, I will get another." So he would hop up to the table and take a fresh piece from the glass finger-bowl, itself a great delight to the glitter-loving birds. To the last the disappearance of the ice was a wonder. But, like that of some other comedians, their conduct was generally low. The way in which they allowed themselves to be sent to bed (an old gate in an outhouse), though free to fly at will, pacing meekly as good as gold, after a day of variegated crime, was their only lapse into real virtue.

The Roller.—The Roller (Coracias Indica), sometimes called in India the blue jay, is sacred to Vishnu, who once assumed its form, and is caught to be liberated at the Hindu Dasahra festival in Western India and at the Dūrga Pūja in Bengal. "Undreamed-of wings he lifted," is a quotation always brought to mind when this gray and sober-looking bird suddenly rises and displays the turquoise and sapphire-tinted splendour of his wings.

The Maina.—The Maina (Acridotheres tristis) is sacred to the Hindu God Ram Deo, and sits on his hand. In stories and talk the maina is a popular favourite, which is natural enough, for the bird is one of the handsomest and most vivacious of the starlings; with an elegant tripping gait, like that of a neatly built ballet-girl, alert and brave in bright yellow boots. In flying, a white bar on the maina's wing produces a curious effect of rotation. Like crows and sparrows, these birds go to roost in great companies, and make a prodigious fuss before they settle to rest, as if each bird were recounting the adventures of the day and all were talking at once.

The Kite.—The common Kite (Milvus govinda) is often spoken of by Europeans as the Brahminy Kite. Naturalists reserve this name for the smaller chocolate-tinted bird with white head and breast, common near rivers,—Haliastur indus. In former times the Kite was held in some esteem by Muhammadans as a presage of victory to the army over which it hovered, and called a blessed or auspicious spirit. Being an eagle in miniature, the Kite perhaps inherited some of the respect born of the ancient and oft-repeated story of an eagle hovering over a future king or leader of men, which is told of Muhammad among many others. In recent times the landing at Boulogne of Napoleon the Last, accompanied by a tame eagle, furnishes a quaint echo of this old world fantasy.

This beautiful creature is almost as common as the crow, and its shrill thin scream, from which the name chīl seems to be derived, is, like the crow's note, a constant and characteristic Indian sound, especially at Calcutta in the spring time. Those who delight in the flight of birds, which surely is one of the most fascinating things in life, may find less interesting diversions than throwing fragments of food from a high roof when a fleet of swift pirates soon assembles. Missed by one, rushed at from opposite points by two or three at a time, no morsel is ever allowed to reach the ground. The fierce sweeps and curves are splendid in grace, strength, and skill, for there is deliberation and poise and a marvellous avoidance of collision in this aerial tournament of rushing wings. When the rains break there occurs a great jail delivery of winged white ants. At this stage the termites are fat white little maggots, temporarily furnished with wings which are shaken off when they find a resting-place. The birds assemble in great numbers for this dainty feast, the kite with the rest. One would think this wide-gaping bird would sail round in the insect cloud open-mouthed, whale-fashion. But he uses his claws even for this minute game, and the action of carrying them to his beak as he flies produces a series of most graceful curtseying undulations.

The habits of the kite have suggested one or two sayings, as: "When do you find meat in a kite's nest?"—a Hindu sneer at Mussulman spendthrifts; when do you find money in a Mussulman's house? Of a lover devoted to a gay lady the same expression is used. The pâras or philosopher's stone is said in a proverb to be in the kite's nest, a dark saying based on the kite's trick of sometimes carrying off gold ornaments, or on the Muhammadan women's superstition that young kites cannot see until there is gold in the nest. The kite has some of the crow's delight in bright objects, and this belief may be based on observation. A person who loiters round or hangs about a house is said to hover like a kite. The word "hover," by the way, is, or used to be, common for "wait" in North Yorkshire, as,—"If tha'rt titter up t'sprunt, hovver,"—"If you get first up the hill, wait." A Delhi street-cry raised by ragged fowlers is—"Free the kite on Tuesday." The notion that it is auspicious to set captured birds free has been noticed above. The practice in the Delhi region is for a mother to pay a pice to the fowler, who swings the kite round over her child's head and lets it go. This ceremony is thought most lucky when performed on a Tuesday or Saturday. One of the Indian boys' games is called the kites' swoop; a foolish person is styled a kite's chick, which really has a most gawky air; and a child always running out in the street is spoken of as a noonday kite, which still hovers in the heat when all sensible folk are indoors.

The kite is a notorious thief; no other creature is so splendidly equipped for larceny, for no other can snatch so unerringly and escape so securely. The confectioner's tray of sweetmeats, the dishes on their way from kitchen to mess or dining-room, the butcher's shop, and the kitchen itself are all liable to his sudden swoop. A recent case occurred of a registered letter containing money being snatched from a postman's hand. I was once feeding a pair of tame ravens from a plate in my hand when a kite, to their loud and deep indignation, cleared and broke it and nearly knocked me over forbye. This habit is made in a country story to point one of the hundred gibes at the tricks of Indian goldsmiths. Four brethren of the craft were overheard by a Wazir debating their business. Said one: "I always take four annas toll out of every rupee's worth of gold in addition to the labour charge." Said another: "I take eight annas," or half the value; the third said, "I always take twelve annas," or three-quarters; but the fourth cried,—"You are three fools, I always take all." The Wazir reported this to his Raja, who said he should like to see how it could be done. So he sent for that fourth goldsmith and ordered him to sit in the palace verandah and make a necklace for the Queen. Three or four ounces of gold were given to him and he set to work. But first, he drove a nail in the verandah post, and when no one was near, he placed bits of meat on it and a kite promptly learned the way thither. Then, in the evenings when he went home, he made a brass chain exactly like the gold one and put it in his pot of acid water. And one day in the presence of the Raja, who was on the watch for deception, he placed the real chain there and presently took out the false one and hung it on the nail to dry. The kite came and took it as the craftsman was speaking to the Raja, who saw the theft. The goldsmith made a great outcry, and bewailed the loss of so many days' labour, and the Raja made it up to him handsomely and gave him gold to make another. When the Raja's back was turned the goldsmith fished up the real chain from the pickling pot and carried it away. Then the goldsmith repeated the trick; which he finally confessed to the Wazir. And the Raja, being amiable, like most princes in stories, was amused and generously rewarded the goldsmith for his knavery.

Cranes and Herons.—The Sarus Crane (Grus antigone) is with some reason regarded as a model of conjugal fidelity, from a belief that, if one of a pair of these handsome birds is killed, the other pines and never mates again. A Spanish proverb says the crane danced with the horse and got a broken leg, but the dancing propensities of cranes and other long-legged birds are seldom noticed in Indian talk, though the birds are common and are often kept in public gardens and by Europeans as pets, and behave in the fantastic fashion well observed and described in the American novel East Angels. (The author of that excellent book speaks of the "candid eyes" that taxidermists give to stuffed parrots. Indian observation notices a want of candour in the living parrot's eye.) For grotesque devilry of dancing, the Indian Adjutant beats creation. Don Quixote or Malvolio were not half so solemn or mincing, and yet there is an abandonment and lightness of step, a wild lift in each solemn prance, which are almost demoniacal. If it were possible for the most angular, tall, and demure of elderly maiden ladies to take a great deal too much champagne and then to give a lesson in ballet-dancing, with occasional pauses of acute sobriety, perhaps some faint idea might be conveyed of the peculiar quality of the adjutant's movements. Such a conception is, of course, outrageously impossible to a well-regulated Western mind, for it is only the French who have thought of calling a lady a "grue." It is notable that of late years Calcutta, which used to be regularly visited by adjutants, has been deserted by them. I have heard natives say that they assemble in waste places to hold councils and to dance.

A really fine expression is the ironical Indian phrase: "The saintly heron," or "saintly as a heron." A heron poised on one leg in a remote corner of a pool is the very image of a Hindu Sādhu or Muhammadan faqir, pretending to be absorbed in holy meditation, while all the time he is intent on the next fish or frog that may come within reach, the next piece of fraud or villainy he can compass. The phrase is common, for there is much of the hypocritical "meditation of the heron" in India as elsewhere.

Poultry.—The Brahma fowl of Western poulterers must have been named in Europe, and is counted one of the unclean things in which those unaccountable people, the English, take an unintelligible pleasure. Hindus hear of its name with more surprise than satisfaction. It is amusing, by the way, to note the easy confidence with which French and English writers on India use the word Brahma, and speak of his temples. There are scarcely any temples to Brahma in India, and his name is very seldom heard. Hindus, as a rule, do not care for domestic poultry which are Levitically unclean, nor for eggs which are not eaten by people of high caste. Rajputs are passionately fond of cock-fighting, but do not fit steel spurs on their birds; indeed, they blunt or dub the spurs which nature has given. The fights are thus of interminable length, the poor creatures staggering round each other, blind with blood round after round, long after they are too much exhausted to strike a blow. The ring attendants fancy it restores the creatures to put their heads into their mouths, a sickening detail not unknown in the cock-pits of our English grandfathers. The Goanese (Portuguese) and many Muhammadans, with some Hindus, are also fond of cock-fighting, and daily large sums of money change hands over this sport. Denunciation of a diversion of this kind is of little use, nor is it easy to fix a point at which legislation can effectively intervene. Little by little the barbarity will die out before the changes now taking place in Indian civilisation. Moreover, although we English are apt to denounce and preach, it does not lie in our mouths to say much. There are many Englishmen who would be glad to take up cock-fighting, and it is only a generation since a large number of good husbands and tender fathers were ready to declare it the finest sport in the world. Blake indignantly wrote—

"A game-cock clipped and armed for fight,
Doth the rising sun affright."

Yet Professor Wilson (Christopher North), also a Christian poet, wrote of cock-fighting with enthusiasm, and pictures of birds thus hideously disfigured are still shown in London shop windows with other sporting prints. Sir Thomas More is farther off, but it is recorded that he was an expert in the detestable game of tying a cock to a post and throwing sticks at it.

A cock without spurs has the same name as a tuskless elephant,—makhna. The old Joe Miller of the roast-fowl with only one leg, of which, when the master remonstrates, the servant said it belonged to a breed of one-legged fowls, is also an Indian story with the same conclusion. The servant shows the master a fowl standing on one leg. The master cries sho! and the fowl runs away with two. "Ah," says the servant, "you did not cry sho! to the fowl in the dish!" Of a man who gives himself airs they say: "Can you have no daylight without cock-crow?" An Afghān proverb quoted by Professor James Darmesteter says: "Though the cock did not crow the dawn would still come." "A hen dreams only of grain" is applied to a sordid person. "A whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God nor men," is a mild English saying, but the Indian version is infamous, for it says, "A hen's crow and a woman's word no one trusts." If one Hindu wants to insult another (he has of course an infinite variety of ways) he calls him a poulterer. A Bengal proverb says the Bengal landlord treats his farmer tenants as the Muhammadan treats fowls, feeds them only to kill them in the end. A Muhammadan way of expressing that one is dissatisfied with his own havings, is: "A house fowl (one you have bred yourself) is no better than pulse." To one who hesitates to chastise a child they say: "The chick doesn't die from a hen's kick." Domestic duties are regularly taught to the girls of a household, so they say: "When the hen scratches, the chickens learn."

Poultry of all kinds are most cruelly handled by dealers and market people, who never seem to think that a bird can feel. Turkeys are left to bleed to death half a day by native servants with intent to bleach the flesh. A Hindu would be shocked by such treatment of a parrot, but fowls are outside the pale of regard.

The Goose.—A bird that seems to have lost some of its ancient repute is the goose, which, though sacred in Buddhist and early Hindu times, finds only a vague and legendary place in modern degradations of Hinduism.

The popular legend is that the goose was the Vâhan of Brahma, on whom fell the curse of Shiva, that henceforth he should not be an object of popular worship. The gait of the goose or the swan (for the two birds seem to be considered the same in the slip-shod talk of the people) is reckoned as next graceful to those of the elephant or the partridge. They say in serious praise of a lady's carriage that she walks like a goose. In Europe we seem to look closer and discriminate the sort of lady with a goose gait, nor do we count it for praise.

The Brahminy Duck.—The note of the ruddy sheldrake or Brahminy duck (Casarca rutila) has won for this bird, which is always seen in pairs, a place in Indian classic poetry as the type of longing but divided lovers. Every night across the river the male cries, "Chakvi, may I come?" and the female responds, "No, Chakva." Then the female mourns, "Chakva, may I come?" and the answer is, "No, Chakvi." (The open Indian vowel sounds give the plaintive bird's cry better than the English "May I come?") With a super-subtle elaboration of the idea of nightly separation, the birds in some verses I have heard, but cannot fully recall, are dolorously apart in spirit even when put in the same cage. The simile was originally good in a poetical sense, and is still alive to the Indian mind, which loves familiar and accustomed turns; but its constant recurrence gives it a mechanical creak to English ears.

The Peacock.—The peacock is the Vâhan or vehicle, of Karttikeya, a god of war, and also of Saraswati, goddess of learning, and is sacred. Many of the troubles between villagers and English soldiers out shooting have arisen from the ignorance of the latter of the veneration in which peacocks are held.

In Guzerat, throughout Rajputana, and in many parts of the Central and North-West Provinces, peacocks run wild, and are as common as rooks in England. A rhyming proverb says, "The deer, the monkey, the partridge, and the peacock are four thieves," but they are never punished for their thefts. They are, however, sometimes caught alive by out-caste jungle folk and brought to market with their eyes sewn up with filaments of their own quills in order to prevent them fluttering and spoiling their plumage. Solomon rebuked the vanity of the peacock's tail by an ungenerous and not particularly apt reference to the ugliness of its legs, and his gibe is still in men's mouths. They are in reality good legs, strong and capable; but it is said, "The peacock danced gaily, till he saw his legs, when he was ashamed and wept bitterly." In some places this saying is accounted for by a story. The peacock and the partridge, or, as some say, the maina, had a dancing match. In those days the peacock had very pretty feet. So when he had danced, the partridge said, "Lend me your feet and see me dance." They changed feet, but instead of dancing, the deceitful partridge ran away and never came back again. The saying is used as an expression of regret for a foolish bargain. Ancient European bestiaries say when the peacock wakes it cries and mourns its lost beauty. In Assam they say with reference to vain people: "If I must die, I must die, but don't touch my top-knot, said the peacock." Women when they dislike a sister woman call her a peacock-legged person, and sometimes after sickness speak of their own limbs in humorous disparagement as like those of the peacock, where an English countrywoman would refer to pipe-stems or bean-sticks. Yet "peacock gaited" is a poetical expression for a graceful carriage, and "a neck like a peacock" is a common compliment to a beautiful woman.

The peacock is credited with a violent antipathy to snakes, and is said to dance them to death, but a vigorous cobra is scarcely likely to be tired out by a bird. In the excitement of a fight the peacock would probably dance round its enemy, and the engagement would be long and doubtful. That the bird is a recognised enemy of snakes in England as well as in India is shown in the interesting volume On Surrey Hills, edited by Mrs. J. A. Owen, where gardens and grounds infested by vipers are said to be infallibly cleared by peacocks.

This bird is said to scent the coming rain, and to scream and dance with delight at its approach. "Frogs and peacocks are refreshed by the rain." In Europe the bird's cry is a rain sign, but we do not credit it with a longing for moisture.

In London drawing-rooms peacock feathers are considered unlucky. In India it would seem to be otherwise. I once saw a Hindu servant limping round with a peacock feather tied on his leg. "Yes, sir, I have a bad pain in my leg and this is very good for it." A spell or mantra must have accompanied the tying, but this I was not privileged to learn. Taus, the Arabic (and Greek) word for a peacock, is current as well as the Hindi Mor. A pretty form of guitar, shaped and painted like a peacock, is known as a taus.

The Owl.—There are birds of evil as well as of good omen, and the owl is here, as elsewhere, a byword of ill luck. "Only owls live alone," is a proverb flung at unsociable people, and a man is said to be as drunk as an owl, while a stupid fellow is most unjustly described as "A son of an owl." Of humble folk and their obscure lives it is said, "Only an owl knows the worth of an owl." "What does a phœnix know of an owl?" It has not occurred to the Oriental jester to speak of a boiled owl in connection with intoxication, but when a husband is abjectly submissive to his wife her friends say she has given him boiled owl's flesh to eat. There are owls of most varieties in India, but a small owl like the cue owl of Italy is the most common and raises a cheerful chuckle at twilight.

In Ceylon the cry of a large owl known as the Devil bird is believed to be a certain herald of death. Nocturnal habits are all that the universal world, including Hindus and Muhammadans, can bring against the owl as a bird of fate. In India, however, though the owl's cry may be dreaded as portending a desolate home, nobody is idiotic enough to kill so valuable a vermin destroyer. That pinnacle of stupidity is the exclusive right of English game preservers.

The Pigeon.—The pigeon, the bird of Mecca, is almost as much a Hindu as a Muhammadan bird, and was chosen by Shiva, the third person of the Hindu Trinity, for Incarnation as Kapoteshwara. I was assured not long ago by a Hindu devotee that in a small temple near the Kashmir frontier, the image of Mahadeo at times takes life as a pair of pigeons which flutter and disappear in the roof. In cities where Hindus preponderate, large flocks of pigeons are regularly fed by Hindu merchants and shopkeepers. The traveller is reminded, by the roar of their wings, of Venice and Constantinople, and if he went farther north he would find them cherished in the villages of Kābul, where they are supposed to pay for their keep by fertilising the soil. Pigeon fanciers are to be found in most towns of Northern India and are generally Muhammadan. They talk of various breeds, and especially prize the Shirāzi and the small strutting white fan-tail, on whose coral-coloured legs they frequently fasten jingling bangles of brass; but they seem to have little of the English skill and care in breeding varieties which Darwin found so full of suggestion. The flight is pretty to watch; it is possible to bet on some incidents of it, and it is also possible to beguile some of a neighbour's to join your own flock. But, like quail fighting, it is not considered a respectable pursuit; and though most boys would like to keep pigeons, respectability is in India as stony and implacable as in the West. A popular proverb says the housewife keeps the parrot, the lover keeps the avadavat, and the thief keeps pigeons. In the English Midlands, thirty years ago, pigeon-flyers were (and are still) called disreputable, and you were supposed to be able to distinguish the scamp from his respectable fellow-workmen by the drake's-tail curl of his hair at the back, the result of continually looking aloft at his birds. It is curious that precisely the same notion obtains here in India.

Although the "homing" propensity of the pigeon is not systematically cultivated and the bird is not regularly employed as a messenger, there are many stories to show that this characteristic trait is recognised. Nor are they always sentimental love tales. A Bengal legend tells the pitiful fate of a Hindu Raja, the last of his race, attacked by Muhammadan invaders. He went bravely out to meet them, carrying with him a pigeon whose return to the palace was to be regarded by his family as an intimation of his defeat, and a signal to put themselves to death and to burn their home. He gained the victory, but while he stooped to drink in the river after the fatigues of the battle, the bird escaped and flew home. The Raja hurried after, but was only in time to throw himself on the still burning pyre.

A common object on the low sky-line of Indian towns of the plain is a light bamboo lattice about six feet square on the top of a tall bamboo pole. This is a pigeon perch, and in the early mornings unkempt pigeon-flyers are seen on the house roofs waving a lure made of rag tied to a stick and whistling through a mouth-call (like that of the English Punch and Judy men) to attract to their roosts the flock of pigeons circling overhead. The evolutions of pigeons in the air, their wheeling and turning on the wing, and the pretty manner of their settling from flight are all so beautiful that it seems stupid to associate a taint of human blackguardism with them.

The Koel.—We English call the cuckoo a blithe newcomer and a vernal harbinger, but we do not, because of the bird's association with the sweet o' the year, consider his song the perfection of all music. A Western ear finds no more in the tune of that cuculine bird, the Koel (Eudynamys honorata) than a tiresome iteration of one or two clear, high, and resonant notes. Yet Oriental poetry, algebraic in its persistent use of a limited number of symbols, has officially adopted the Koel as the figure for exquisite sound; so the voice of your beloved, the performances of a musical artiste, and all best worth hearing in life are posted under this heading. A Delhi shoemaker or a Lucknow embroiderer can tell you of other bird music, but they have not read much classic poetry and hear with their ears. The Englishman in India has a grudge against the Koel; listening with modified rapture to notes that warn him to put up his punkah, overhaul his thermantidote, and prepare for the long St. Laurence penance of an Indian summer. And he thinks longingly of an English spring.

"Ah! Koel, little Koel, singing on the siris bough,
In my ears the knell of exile your ceaseless bell-like speech is,
Can you tell me aught of England or of spring in England now?"

Natives say crows hate the Koel because it selects their nests for its foundling eggs, which is very probable. I have seen crows mobbing a Koel, but then crows are like London street boys, and will mob anybody of unfamiliar aspect.

The Coppersmith.—The Coppersmith bird is another noisy herald of spring. This is the handsome crimson-breasted barbet (Xantholæma hæmacephala), and its cry of tock, tock, fills the air as completely as the sound of a hammer on a brazen vessel. It has the same cadence, and with each loud beat the bird's head is swung to right and left alternately. Sir Edwin Arnold in his Light of Asia gives an Indian Spring picture in a few words:—

"... In the mango-sprays
The sun-birds flashed; alone at his green forge
Toiled the loud Coppersmith...."

But when you are down with fever and headache you heartily wish the noisy bird would take a holiday or go on strike.

The Sparrow.—To the native of India the sparrow seems to stand as the type of a thing of naught, an intrusive feathered fly to be brushed aside—but on no account to be starved or harmed. Our bird is a size smaller than his Western brother, and is tolerated both by Hindu and Muhammadan. In mosque courts one sometimes sees pretty troughs made of brick with divisions for water and food; and in trees near shrines, or over the places where devotees sit, earthen saucers are slung with food and water, all for the sparrow. A Hindu proverb quoted in Fallon's Dictionary says: "God's birds in God's field! eat, birds, eat your bellies full." This pious and kindly word is easily reconciled in practice with a just appreciation of the essential triviality and impertinence of the bird. A large toll is daily taken all over the country from field and garden, and the equally accessible grain-dealer's basket. The most devout Hindu alive waves them off from his stores, for he also must live.

TERRA-COTTA SEED AND WATER TROUGH (FROM A PUNJAB VILLAGE MOSQUE)

But though the sparrow is a nuisance, it is seldom you hear the bird reckoned a downright plague, as is undoubtedly the case in America, where it is a type of the worst kind of immigrant from which the country has suffered. The reason may be that the same law of protection which leaves the sparrow free to plunder, is also extended to the hawk, the shrike, the weasel, and the wild cat, who keep the balance fairly even among them. Yet when you listen closely you may hear, in spite of the vast Oriental tolerance, many an angry word about bird depredations.

London sparrows are said to be familiar, but when compared with their Indian brethren, their manners are marked by dignity and cold reserve. Being much given to marriage, they make a tremendous fuss over their housekeeping, and when in search of a nesting-place nothing is sacred to them. Above all, the nest must be sheltered from the heat, and the coolest places in the land are the interiors of men's houses. An Englishman's house is the coolest of all, so newly-joined couples, conversing loudly, are constantly finding their way indoors, creeping like mice through bath-water channels and under the bamboo blinds that keep out flies, bringing with them straw and other rubbish for their untidy beds. When making a morning call, you may stumble into a darkened drawing-room to find the lady of the house perched on a chair, madly thrashing up to the roof-beams with a carriage-whip, while a servant pulls the long cord of an upper window, crying "sho!" A bird in church is a rare and delightful incident to a bored child in the West, but the Indian sparrow perches on the organ-pipes in full blast, and chatters loudly through the sermon. Its note is a constant part of the out-door orchestra of Indian life, accompanying the caw of the crow, the thin squeal of the squirrel and scream of the kite, the groan of the Persian wheel, the wailing song of the ox-driver at the well, the creak of the ungreased cart axle, and the bark of the village dog.

Falconry.—Falconry, which is still a favourite sport in Sind and Northern India, is too extensive to be more than glanced at. The literature of the subject is just as fantastic as the writings of our forefathers in Europe; as in our old falconry books, hawks are broadly described as light or dark-eyed, round or long-winged, noble or ignoble, and the sport is considered in the highest degree aristocratic. Sir Richard F. Burton is the only English writer who can claim to be an authority on the subject in its literary as well as in its practical aspect. The identity of the Indian apparatus of the sport with that of Europe strikes even the uninstructed. The hawk-hood of soft deerskin, prettily embroidered with silk and gold, the falconer's gloves, jesses, lures, and hawk-bells are still regularly made in the Punjab, with one or two trifling variations. European pictures show the lure fitted with portions of a bird's wing, which are absent from the Indian lure, and the falconer goes afield with his hawks perched on a hoop slung round his body, while here, when more than one are carried, they travel on a horizontal pole. Staying once at the chief town of a native state I wondered at the number of hawks carried about, and concluded that when a man wanted an excuse for a stroll he went to the Raja's mews and got a hawk to take out for an airing on his wrist. ("A man looks so fond without a dog" said the collier in Mr. C. Keene's Punch picture.) During a gathering of chiefs at Lahore to meet Lord Dufferin and the Duke of Connaught, falcons and falconers came to swell the retinues of the Rajas, and I observed the constables on duty at the museum in my charge wanted to make the men leave their hawks outside when they came to see that institution. A stuffed bird in a glass case might, of course, tempt a hawk, but when hooded the creature is as well behaved as a sleeping child.

UNHOODED

The attendant circumstance of Indian falconry is not without its charm, especially during the clear cold weather of the Punjab winter. I remember riding to a hawking party across a wide sandy plain where cultivation was scanty, a fresh wind blowing, and in the far distance the snowy range of the Himálaya sparkled white against the intense blue. A group of elephants, with howdahs and trappings blazing in colour and gold, furnished the vast wind-swept spaces with a touch of colour, and even the blue and red patterns daubed on their gigantic foreheads looked delicate and pretty. The strange heraldic monsters in beaten silver with glass eyes that supported the howdahs, and the great red cloths splashed with gold embroidery, would have been garish at close quarters; but here they suited perfectly with the cavalcade of horsemen attired in scarlet and gold, the leashed dogs straining and snarling, and the motley crowd of beaters, chill in the morning sunshine. The hawks sharply turned their heads in expectation, tugging and straining at their jesses like anchored ships in a gale. But when all was over, the bustards found and flown at had escaped without scathe, and one of the hawks was lost. As a man who has never been able to find pleasure in the chase, and who never possessed a gun, I found no personal fault with this issue, but when people set forth to do a thing they ought to do it well.

Hawks must often be lost; for a countryside proverb about kangni, the small Italian millet, says that its cultivation is "as risky as keeping a hawk."

I have heard of flights where the hawk does all that is set down for him in the books, and I have watched the careful training of hawks to come back to the lure, where they are rewarded with a bit of newly killed crow, etc., but I strongly suspect the best of the business is the riding and the company. Any one in the habit of looking at birds in India may see free hawking enough,—the shrike, which in a town garden brings down a sparrow nearly as big as himself, the gallant and tigerish sparrow-hawk, and on far hillsides falcons of two or three kinds.

Of a sponging hanger-on they say, "You train your hawk on another man's fist." "Doesn't know cock-fighting and has taken to hawking!" is a good jape at a common kind of fool.

Bird Crumbs.—An odd fancy is current about the sandpiper. It is believed to sleep on its back under the impression that it is supporting the firmament with its slender legs. There are human bipeds who think themselves almost as necessary to the universe. A black-and-white kingfisher is called the dizzy or giddy one from its sudden, vertiginous plunge into the water after its prey. A curious parallel in nomenclature is shown in the water-wagtail, which haunts brook and pond sides,—places where clothes are washed,—and is called the dhobin or washer-woman. In France the same bird, from the same habit, is known as the lavandière.

The Shia Muhammadans have woven many legends round their martyr heroes, Hussain and Hassan, slain at Kerbela. The handsome King crow or drongo (Dicrurus ater) is said to have brought water to the dying Imâm Hussain, while the dove, dipping her beak in his sacred blood, flew to Medina, and thus bore the news of his martyrdom.

In Mr. F. S. Growse's translation of the Rāmāyana of Tūlsi Dass—a book which ought to be studied by those who care to know what the best current Hindu poetry is like, in its sugared fancy, its elaborate metaphors, its real feeling for the heroic and noble, and also its tedious, unaccidented meandering—there occurs a pretty description of the Army of Love, in which some of the birds take parts outside the stereotyped roles occasionally referred to in foregoing paragraphs—"the murmuring cuckoos are his infuriated elephants, and the herons his bulls, camels, and mules; the peacocks, chukors (red-legged partridges), and parrots are his war-horses; the pigeons and swans his Arab steeds; the partridges and quails his foot-soldiers; but there is no describing the whole of Love's host." A sentence which might have stood at the beginning closes the long-drawn description—"His (Love's) greatest strength lies in woman: any one who can escape her is a mighty champion indeed."

Bats.—Of bats—the leathern-winged jackals of the air—there is not much to be said, for although India has an immense number and variety of these wonderful and most useful creatures, the people seem scarcely to notice them. It takes a naturalist to admire and appreciate darkness-loving animals; and among Indian bats there is a fine field, especially those adorned by nature with elaborate leaf-like processes on the nostrils, strange and fantastic beyond telling.

Those, however, who have been received in dull houses will enjoy the fine irony of a saying which runs, "The bat had a guest (and said), 'I'm hanging, you hang too.'" No need to expound this five-word jewel, since most of us know houses whose inmates seem to hang in a torpid row, and where we resign ourselves on entering to be hung up in a similar sleepy fashion. There is also a story about Solomon, the birds, and the bats, but it has no very effective point. I know of no saying in any tongue acknowledging the great utility of the bat in keeping down an excess of insect life.

The large fruit-eating bat or flying-fox is a noble creature, looming largest, perhaps, when in the still breathless evenings he beats his noiseless way high over the wan waters of Bombay harbour or the adjacent creeks, dark against a sky in which there lingers a lurid flush of crimson and orange. The lowest castes eat flying-foxes, which are probably of excellent flavour, seeing they grow fat on the best of the fruit. They are regularly eaten in the Malay Archipelago, and Mr. Wallace says that when properly dressed they have no offensive fumet, and taste like hare. I once kept one, but he could scarcely be called an amusing pet, his strong point being his enormous appetite for bananas. On one occasion he escaped and began to fly away, but promptly came back, for he was mobbed by flights of crows, who had never seen such a creature before. Crows go early to bed, and the appearance of this monster bat in their own daylight seemed to be an outrage on their rights and feelings. So they chivied him—if I may be allowed the expression—much as the street boys are said to have chivied Jonas Hanway when he appeared in London streets with the first umbrella. The flying-fox was in a great fright, knowing that a single stroke of a crow's beak would ruin the membrane of his vans, more delicate than any silk ever stretched on a "paragon" frame.

In pairing time flying-foxes are lively all day, though they do not fly abroad, and the trees in which they hang in great reefs and clusters are so noisy with their quarrelling, screaming, and fighting, as to be a serious nuisance to a quiet village.

CHAPTER III

OF MONKEYS

"His hide was very mangy, and his face was very red,
And ever and anon he scratched with energy his head.
His manners were not always nice, but how my spirit cried
To be an artless Bandar loose upon the mountain side!"

R. K.

MONKEY GOD

ome of the respect in which these animals are held by Hindus is a reflection of the popularity of Hanumān, or (in Southern India) of Mâruti, the monkey general of the great Hindu epic—the devoted henchman of Ram Chandra, and a marvel of valour and address combined with gentleness. He has now become a god, and is one of the most widely worshipped of Hindu deities. Pictures and rude images are to be seen of him everywhere, but he is not represented in the more ancient Hindu sculptures. A notion exists among Hindus that the English may be his descendants through a female servant of the demon king, who had charge of Sita in captivity, and who treated the prisoner so well that Rama blessed her, prophesying that she should become the mother of a race that would possess the land, and whom Hanumān took to wife. This can scarcely be made out from the poem, but the tradition exists. Others, again, say that the English came from the "monkey army," which unlovely phrase is occasionally used to describe the British nation.

But, while the enthusiastic cult of Hanumān as a divinity is a comparatively modern development of Hinduism, the fondness of Hindus for monkeys is of very ancient date. Ælian describes the offerings of rice which are still customary, and at sacred places, as Benares, Ajodhia, and Muttra, they are regularly fed, and it is regarded as an abominable act of sacrilege to kill one. A large temple at Benares under the invocation of Durga (Devi, Kali, etc.) has swarms of monkeys attached to it, but they do not appear, as might be expected, to be usually attendant on shrines of the Monkey God himself. They naturally cluster round groves frequented by devotees of various kinds for the sake of scraps of food which they are sure to receive there, and because they are safe from molestation. Muhammadan saints as well as Hindu sâdhus show kindness to these creatures, and it is quite intelligible that their gambols should serve to amuse the large and languid leisure of professional holiness.

The brown macacus rhesus is the commonest type and most frequently seen both in the hills and plains. Ælian in his description mixes up the Macaque with the true Hanumān, the tall, long-tailed, black-faced, white-whiskered langūr (Presbytes illiger), clad in an overcoat of silver gray. The latter has a face that reminds one of Mr. Joel Harris's "Uncle Remus," and is, in his way, a king of the jungle, nor is he so frequently met with in confinement as his brown brother. In some parts of India troops of langūrs come bounding with a mighty air of interest and curiosity to see the railway trains pass, their long tails uplifted like notes of interrogation; but frequently, when fairly perched on wall or tree alongside, they seem to forget all about it, and avert their heads as you go by with an affectation of languid indifference. This may be a mark of the superiority of the monkey mind, or a sign that some threads were dropped when its fabric was woven. The black gibbon or hooluck (hylobates hooluck) is better known in Bengal and Assam, and is well adapted for captivity, if a pair can be secured, and the keeper does not object to a gentle, mournful, and timid animal, the spirit of the complaining dove in the form of a black djinn or demon with a voice like a pack of hounds in full cry. The hooluck is monogamous, and seems to have few of the vulgar monkey vices, but is a depressing companion. In Assam, too, is found a dainty little monkey familiarly known as "the shame-faced one"—a gentle, bashful, large-eyed creature, with a quaint trick of hiding its face in its hands and hanging its head like a timid child. It has a peculiarly soft and lustrous pelage of fine colour and texture.

Under a benign rule of protection the monkey increases rapidly, and, being a daring and mischievous pilferer, becomes a serious nuisance. One may hold a creature sacred and yet be thoroughly alive to all the faults of its character, and the monkey in ordinary talk is used pretty much as it is in Europe to point morals against wanton mischief, helplessness, and evil behaviour generally. Nor is it only in field and garden that its depredations are felt. Indian shops have no doors or windows, but are like large cupboards open to the street, in which food grains and other articles are exposed for sale; and in towns where Hindus preponderate and a busy current of trade has not swept the streets, bulls, calves, parakeets, sparrows, and monkeys take tolls which the dealer would fain prevent, but that he is few and fat, while the depredators are many and active. A stout grocer nodding among his store baskets, while a monkey, intently watching the sleeper's face, rapidly stuffs his cheek pouches with grain, is a common sight, as well as a comical one. Of late years the tradesmen who form the bulk of the members of our municipalities have felt that there are too many Hanumāns abroad, and have ventured on proceedings that would not have been tolerated in the days of complete Brahmanical ascendency. Numbers of the marauders have been caught, caged, and despatched on bullock carts to places many miles distant. There they have been let loose, but, as the empty carts returned, the monkeys, quick to perceive and defeat the plan of their enemies, bounded gaily alongside, and trooped in through the city gates with the air of a holiday party returning from a picnic. From some river-side towns boat-loads have been taken across the Ganges; but they dislike being marooned, and when they have failed to board the returning boats, have found others to carry them back. Railways, which have done much for Indian progress, offer facilities for deportation which monkey-ridden municipalities have been glad to seize. The stationmaster at Saharunpore was recently troubled by a telegram advising him of the despatch of cars laden with monkeys, which he was requested to send out to be freed on the adjacent Sewalik hills. But the cages were broken in unloading the freight and the crowd got loose. Saharunpore is an Indian Crewe or Swindon in a small way, with a railway establishment, a Government Botanical garden and large private fruit gardens. The exiles invaded the busy workshops and lost their tempers, monkey fashion, among the driving bands and machinery, nor were they easily driven out. A large male was seen pulling the point-levers of a siding with the sudden petulance of his kind; and another established himself between the double roofs of one of the inspection carriages used by railway officers on tour as houses, stealing from the pantry such trifles as legs of mutton, corkscrews, lamp glasses and dusters,—articles for which a monkey can have but little use. The bulk of the company trooped into the gardens of the town, where the proprietors, being mainly Muhammadans with no respect for Hanumān, took measures of their own against the invasion.

LANGŪRS AT HOME

An amusing case of monkey plunder occurred some years ago at Simla. The chief confectioner of the place had prepared a magnificent bride-cake, which was safely put by in a room that, like most Simla rooms, looked on the steep hillside. It is of little use, however, locking a door when the window is left open. So when they came to fetch the cake, the last piece of it was being handed out of the window by a chain of monkeys who had whitened the hillside with its fragments. A theft of this kind is mainly mischievous, for the wild monkey dislikes food mixed with butter, nor does he greatly care for sugar. A bride-cake, too, looks (and is to my humble taste) about as edible as a plaster cast, and one can scarcely understand how they discovered it was meant to be eaten. The creature has a passion for picking things to pieces. A flower or a fragile toy will amuse a monkey for a long time. If a bird falls into its hands it will not be released till it is plucked of every feather. If the bird resents the process, the monkey with an unconcerned air rubs its head vigorously on the ground. It would not be difficult to train a monkey to pluck fowls for use in the kitchen. It is often said that the monkey kills snakes by grinding the head on a stone, occasionally spitting on it, nor is the feat incredible to one who has observed the constant habit of rubbing things on the ground and holding them up for inspection. Yet in spite of this belief, a popular saying, expressing a dilemma or an opportunity that cannot be turned to profit, is—"Like a snake in a monkey's hand." He is afraid of it, but he will not let go. Natives also say that monkeys rob birds' nests and destroy eggs and young in pure malice. The fastidiousness of the wild monkey's taste is curious, considering the precarious existence it leads. Daily for some months my family and myself were interested in a troop of wild monkeys, which we regularly fed, trying them with very various food. Once we gave them biscuits which, from lying in a dealer's shop, had acquired that peculiarly stale, tinny flavour which Anglo-Indians know too well. They had been accustomed to eat the same kind of biscuit when fresh, and scrambled as usual for the fragments, but after the first bite they made comical mouths of dislike, spat out vigorously, rubbed the biscuit on their sides, on the ground, examined it carefully, and seemed to conclude,—"Yes, it's the same as yesterday," tried again, and then chattered and grinned in wrath and disgust. But they soon learned to discriminate by smell merely.

Like the over-wise crow, which is apt to outwit itself by futile cunning, the monkey is most ingeniously suspicious. Our friends grew bold with encouragement, but their manners were never friendly; with the exception of one which had evidently escaped from confinement. We managed to entrap the creature, and having removed its hateful collar, set it free again. My daughter could coax this experienced person into a room and it would open her hand to take grain, keeping a sharp look-out on the open door. All the rest were keenly suspicious, and irritable. They seemed to circumvent each morsel and, having won it, defied us with angry eyes to take it back again, regarding our free gift as a triumph of their own finesse. This is natural enough when we consider that for generations the monkey folk have been chased from field and garden plot with shouting. They were in no fear for their lives, and had learned the very human satisfaction of defying an enemy from a safe distance.

This shallow cunning has deeply impressed the minds of the people. They say it is absolutely impossible to poison a monkey. For ages this belief has been rooted in the minds of Orientals. Al Masudi, who compiled his Arabic encyclopædia—"meadows of gold and mines of gems"—in the tenth century, wrote that most Chinese and Hindu kings keep wise but dumb monkeys as tasters for their tables, relying implicitly on their judgment of what is poisoned and what is wholesome. A native gentleman told me of a cultivator in the hills whose crops and garden were so seriously injured that he determined to get rid of his enemies. So he daily set out platters of boiled rice which they greedily ate. When they had learned the habit of coming in crowds, he one day set out rice poisoned with a tasteless drug. He heard a great chatter and whining round his treacherous platters, and saw a council sitting round the untasted food in earnest debate. Presently they rose and scampered away, but soon returned, each bearing twigs and leaves of a plant which their instinct taught them was an antidote to the poison. With these they stirred and mixed the rice, which they afterwards ate with their usual relish, returning the next morning for more, absolutely unharmed. This story is also told, mutatis mutandis, of an attempt made by a Sikh noble, Sirdar Lehna Singh Majithia, to poison troublesome monkeys at the sacred town of Hurdwar. When you believe that monkeys are capable of speech and only refrain from speaking for fear that they would be made to work, it is easy to credit them with a knowledge of chemistry. Belief in their ability to speak is widely current in India, and the notion is not unknown in the West.

But while native credulity will swallow the impossible with ease, native observation is not without keenness. The inability of the monkey to make for itself a shelter against the heavy rains of the country is noted in proverbs. It is really curious that in the Simla region, where are many built-out roads forming dry refuges of quite natural aspect, they are never resorted to. Troops of monkeys will sit shivering for hours in driving storms within a few yards of covered spaces, which seem as if specially provided for their shelter and comfort.

Their daily life is interesting to watch. The scheme seems to be patriarchal with a touch of military organisation, for they move and plunder in a sort of formation, and the patriarch is at once commander-in-chief and effective fighting force. Its main fact is the tyranny of the leading male of each troop, who grows to a great size, with immensely powerful shoulders. He develops large canine teeth, which some observant Hindu draughtsmen take care to grace their pictures of Hanumān withal. These are used unsparingly on the younger male members of the troop, in fighting for his place of power, and on disobedient females. "The demon" was the familiar name we gave to a leader with whom we were well acquainted. He seemed to be always angry and was easily moved to a paroxysm of rage, when he used worse language than any permitted to man, for there was a savage force and variety in his grunting fury which made one thankful he was untranslatable. He took the lion's share of everything, especially resenting that the rising bachelors of the troop should have a chance. Mothers and babies were merely cuffed aside from a morsel, but there was ruthless war between him and all who might become his rivals. No more perfect picture of headlong, desperate terror can be imagined than a young man-monkey plunging and bounding in reckless flight down the hillside, pursued as he screams by a livid and grunting elder. Natives may well call the monkey sire Maharaja, for he is the very type and incarnation of savage and sensual despotism. They are right, too, in making their Hanumān red, for the old male's face is of the dusky red you see in some elderly, over-fed, human faces.

Like human Maharajas, they have their tragedies and mayhap their romances. One morning there came a monkey chieftain, weak and limping, having evidently been worsted in a severe fight with another of his own kind. One hand hung powerless, his face and eyes bore terrible traces of battle, and he hirpled slowly along with a pathetic air of suffering, supporting himself on the shoulder of a female,—a wife, the only member of his clan who had remained faithful to him after his defeat. We threw them bread and raisins, and the wounded warrior carefully stowed the greater part away in his cheek pouch. The faithful wife, seeing her opportunity, sprang on him, holding fast his one sound hand, and opening his mouth she deftly scooped out the store of raisins. Then she sat and ate them very calmly at a safe distance, while he mowed and chattered in impotent rage. He knew that without her help he could not reach home, and was fain to wait with what patience he might till the raisins were finished. It was a sad sight, but, like more sad sights, touched with the light of comedy. This was probably her first chance of disobedience or of self-assertion in her whole life, and I am afraid she thoroughly enjoyed it. Then she led him away,—possibly to teach him more salutary lessons of this modern and "advanced" sort, so that at the last he would go to another life with a meek and chastened soul.

Monkey mothers are tender to their little ones, with a care that endears them to the child-loving Oriental. The babies are quaint little mites with the brown hair that afterwards stands up crest-wise, parted in the middle of their brows; their wistful faces are full of wrinkles, and their mild hazel eyes have a quick glancing timidity, that well suits their pathetic, lost, kitten-like cry. Yet even in the forest there are frisky matrons. I have seen a mother monkey, disturbed in her gambols on the ground by the whining of a tiny baby left half-way up an adjacent tree, suddenly break off, and hastily shinning up the tree, snatch up the baby, hurry to the very topmost branch, where she plumped it down as who should say,—"Tiresome little wretch!" and then come down to resume her play. Thus is a mischievous midshipman mast-headed, and thus is the British baby sent up to the nursery while mamma amuses herself. Natives say that when monkey babies die the mothers often go mad, and that in the excess of their affection they occasionally squeeze their offspring to death. It is at least certain that a mother monkey will carry with her for weeks the dried and dead body of her little one, nursing and petting it as if it were alive. In defence of the little ones the sires will fight savagely, as is their duty. I knew a fat fox terrier, the dream of whose life was to catch a monkey. Once it came true, and for half a minute, said a man who saw, he held a baby monkey. I was indoors at the time, but as the dog passed me to take refuge under a chair, I knew from his solemn silence that something had happened. The leader monkey had fallen upon him and inflicted three frightful bites—more like deep knife-cuts than the work of teeth—which seemed likely to prove fatal; but first-rate surgical skill was available, and Bob was saved to carefully avoid monkeys in future.

A quaint episode of our acquaintanceship with monkey folk was the arrival during one of our levees of one of the wandering performers who lead about tame monkeys with a goat that serves them as charger. The wild monkeys drew off at first suspiciously, but when the man sat down to his performance and made their tame brethren dance, put on strange raiment, and mount the goat, they crept closer with horrified curiosity and evident disgust. The tame monkeys off duty regarded their free kinsmen with listless indifference, and the artiste at work never seemed to glance at them, though they watched him with jealous and angry eyes, much, I imagine, as labourers on strike watch blacklegs.

There is a belief that during severe winters wild monkeys, instead of furtively hanging about the grocers' shops and watching their chance to steal, come into Simla streets in bands and stand whining like beggars asking for alms. But there is only native authority for this story. It is just possible they may have been so hard pressed as to seek human help, but it is an immense step for such wild and distrustful creatures to take. Some shopkeepers habitually feed them, and they may have whined at a place where they missed their daily dole.

A wistful, watchful melancholy seems to be the normal mood of the mature monkey, broken by sudden flashes of interest which change as suddenly into indifference or abstraction. Few animals seem to spend so much time in sitting and looking about them, while only the birds can command more lofty posts of observation. Among men, some sailors and many Orientals have a similar faculty of tranquil outlooking. But the sudden flash of interest in a triviality and its abrupt cessation remind one more of lunacy than of sane humanity. Their life is hard and hungry, and as the creatures lope disconsolately along in the rain, or crouch on branches with dripping backs set against the tree trunk as a shelter from the driving storm, they have the air of being very sorry for themselves. Consumption is not unknown among them, and a monkey's cough, heard through the drip of the forest on a wet night, is a dismal sound. But when the sun shines the younger ones play like schoolboys. They have a game like the English boys' cock of the dung-hill or king of the castle, but instead of pushing each other from the top of a knoll or dust-heap, the castle is a pendent branch of a tree. The game is to keep a place on the bough, which swings with their weight as with a cluster of fruit while the players struggle to dislodge one another, each, as he drops, running round and climbing up again to begin anew. This sport is kept up for an hour at a time with keen enjoyment, and when one is nimble as a monkey it must be splendid fun.

YOUNG MONKEYS AT PLAY

The way of a ship on the sea may be strange, but the path of a monkey through tree-land is no less surprising. At one moment a creature is in tranquil meditation on the creation of the world or the origin of evil, at the next it has thrown itself backward apparently into illimitable space, but at the right instant a bough is seized and the animal swings to another and another with infallible certainty. The larger langūr does not seem to play concerted games, and his movements have a bolder sweep and abandonment. He travels on a more lofty story of the tree-terraces, progressing through the pines in a succession of leaping feats, performed with the ease, deliberation, and precision of perfect gymnastic art. The scenery which nature has assigned to this performance gives an impression of freedom which makes the thought of confinement infamous.

On the plains life would appear to be easier, for there is an almost constant succession of fruits and edible leaves in the jungles, and the crops are more accessible. Thievish monkeys sometimes haunt the halting-places of travellers. A friend of mine halted at a parao or stage where was a grove of mango-trees affording grateful shade to travellers, and while resting, he watched a little comedy. Apart from the others, a Hindu was preparing his evening meal. In one pot over the fire a stew of pulse was boiling, while he kneaded dough and baked the invariable wheaten flap-jacks. As each cake is taken from the iron griddle plate it is stuck edgewise in the hot embers till all are ready, when they are piled together. This was done, and the Hindu turned to set the ghi pot and drinking vessels in order and to hail his companion to come to dinner. While his back was turned, a big monkey dropped from the boughs overhead, seized the pile of cakes, and was off in a flash. Now the baking of bread is a semi-ritualistic business, involving a good deal of labour, and it was a very angry Hindu who received in his face one of the hot flap-jacks dropped by the monkey clutching his prize with awkward fingers above. Then the other man came and swore too, but the monkey swore the worst, irritated by the heat of his plunder, which, however, he was determined not to let go. The watchman of the stage assured my friend that this trick was a frequent occurrence, for that particular monkey was "as cunning as a baniya (or tradesman) and as daring as a thug (highway robber)—a very demon of a monkey." Yet it had never occurred to him or to the robbed travellers to take measures against it.

It may be that "advanced India" will in time give up the protection of the monkey, but there are hitherto no signs of a change in popular feeling. In April 1886, in the highly civilised and cosmopolitan city of Bombay, a Hindu of good position was in danger of losing every social privilege of his caste and of undergoing an ostracism more complete than any imagined by Athenian citizen or Irish Land-leaguer, because he was said to have allowed a European officer of police to shoot a troublesome monkey from the window of his house. The officer had been invited by the people to rid them of the creature, and its death was frankly acknowledged as a relief, but the letter of the law forbade the murder. Officers of government are careful not to wound the feelings of the people with reference both to monkeys and peacocks, a delicacy which does not always restrain the hungry low-caste man.

A collector and magistrate of a district in Hindustan proper had been out shooting, and was returning to camp. On a tree on the other side of the Ganges Canal, along which he was walking, sat a monkey. The animal seemed almost out of range, and my friend idly pointed his gun and fired in its direction with intent to startle it, but, to his dismay, the monkey fell and lay dead. Fortunately no one was near, and at night this worshipful magistrate, whose word was law for leagues round, stole out alone with a lantern, taking a long round to the nearest bridge, to look for his victim. It was not easily found, and never, even on the judicial bench, did he so keenly realise the feelings of a murderer trying to hide the evidences of his guilt. He succeeded in disposing of the body, and returned to camp determined never to point a gun at a monkey again. Another friend of mine had for neighbour a Hindu devotee of great repute and sanctity, whose hut, besides being a resort of gamblers and bad characters, had a large retinue of monkeys that were fed by visitors. The animals wrought great havoc in my friend's garden, whereupon in his irritation he threatened to shoot them. The Sâdhu took the will for the deed, and fulminated a curse against the Englishman as terrible as that which the Archbishop of Rheims inflicted on the jackdaw. He was filled with a holy joy when my friend fell ill, and desponded when he recovered.

St. Francis de Sales wrote:—"I am despised and I grow angry;—so does the peacock or the monkey." This is more like an Oriental than a Western word. The irritable monkey is ready to be angry at anything. The Oriental, however, considers the monkey—apart from his sacred affinity with Hanumān, a type, not so much of petulance, as of untrustworthiness. "What is a monkey's friendship worth?" he asks, and he says in scorn of a trivial and foolish person—"a tailless monkey." "A cocoa-nut in a monkey's hand," stands for ill-bestowed gifts or gear and for ineptitude, for the creature cannot get at the kernel, having neither strength nor wit to break the shell. "A flower in a monkey's hand" is a common Malay expression to a similar purpose. "One monkey does not tell another monkey that his buttocks are red" is a homely word with obvious uses. There are ten things, says a proverb, which may not be depended upon—"A courtesan, a monkey, fire, water, a procuress, an army, a distiller, a tailor, a parrot, and a goldsmith." The selection is significant, and—in India—just. In the stables of the wealthy a monkey is often kept to attract to itself stray influences of the evil eye, that ever-present bogy of the East. So there is a saying,—"What goes wrong in the stable falls on the monkey's head." This can be used in daily life by those frequent persons who habitually fancy themselves wrongly accused. It is unlucky to utter the word monkey in the morning, but lucky to see one before breakfast. "Speak of a monkey or an owl in the morning and you'll get no breakfast."

In the Rāmāyana of Tūlsi Dass, (a relatively modern version of the great epic poem in which the Hindus delight) a method of catching monkeys by means of a bait of grain in a narrow-mouthed jar is spoken of as an example of the metaphysical principle of illusion which makes so great a figure in Hindu cobweb philosophy. The monkey is supposed to fill his fist so full that he is unable to withdraw it, and has not the wit to let go his spoil and release himself. This is quite reasonable enough for a metaphysical illustration. A more practical form of illusion is to put some grain in a clear glass bottle and hand it to a monkey. It tries to seize the grain, then, concluding the distance was not properly judged, it takes a careful sight along the bottle, and, with a diverting air of great astuteness, passes a slow hand down and gives a sudden clutch. After one or two attempts it loses temper and interest. Similarly, the illusion of a mirror puzzles a young dog when he is first introduced to it, and, according to his character and temper, interests and excites him, but after a short time he gives it up and waits for more facts, like the philosopher he is. A foolish cock-sparrow, on the other hand, will nearly kill himself in fighting his reflection.

Does the survival of respect for monkeys, amounting at times to a definite acknowledgment of kinship, indicate the early arrival of Hindu philosophers at the latest conclusion of European Evolutionists? Modern Hindu students of the Vedas and other ancient records draw from those vague depths material to support such theories as the Hindu discovery of America and the founding of the ruined cities of its central region; with the use of balloons, railways, and contrivances like the electric telegraph. A slender verbal hint suffices to give a complacent sense of having once at least marched in the foremost files of time. But they would be on more plausible, if not more solid ground in essaying to show that the Hindu respect for life, the admission of the essential unity of the life-spark, whether in man or moss, and the special regard for the ancestral monkey, its deification, and the traditions of its aptitude for speech, labour, and war, were proofs that the philosophy of the East has for ages sat in tranquil occupation of a peak of discovery to which the vanguard of Western science has but now attained.

CHAPTER IV

OF ASSES

"'Twas when the rain fell steady and the ark was pitched and ready,
And Noah got his orders for to take the bastes below:
He haled them all together by the hide and horn and feather,
And all except the donkey were agreeable to go.

"Then Noah spoke him fairly, then rated him sevarely,
And then he cursed him squarely to the glory of the Lord,
'Divil take the ass that bred you and the triple ass that fed you,
Divil go with you, you spalpeen;'—and the donkey went aboard.

"But the wind was always failin' and 'twas most onaisy sailin',
And the ladies in the cabins couldn't stand the stable air,
And the bastes betwixt the hatches, they tuk and died in batches,
And Noah said 'There's one of us that hasn't paid his fare.'

"For he heard a flusteration with the bastes of all creation,
The trumpeting of elephants and the bellowing of whales.
And he saw forninst the windy, when he went to stop the shindy,
The Devil with a pitchfork, bedevilling their tails.

"The Devil cursed outrageous, but Noah said umbrageous,—
'To what am I indebted for this tenant-right invasion?'
And the Devil gave for answer,—'Evict me if you can, sir,
For I came in with the donkey at your honour's invitation.'"

R. K.

assing from the free to the fettered, we come to a beast which in India serves at once as an expression of wild liberty, more complete than that of the monkey, and of utter and abject slavery. There is no freedom more unrestrained than that of the wild ass and no bondage more bitter than that of his brother in servitude. For a wholly unmerited obloquy, relic of a dark aboriginal superstition, is added to the burden of toil and hard living. Yet there was once a time when in the nearer East, or ever the horse was known, he was held in high honour, carved in Assyrian sculptures, and reckoned a suitable steed for prophets and kings. Even now in Cairo, Damascus, and Bagdad, although the Bedawi Arab pretends to despise him, he is regularly ridden by respectable people.

The Arabian Nights story of a conversation overheard between the ox and the ass shows the estimation in which he was held; and it is written that Muhammad himself had two asses, one of which was called Yafūr, nor did that great man disdain to ride double. But here in India, by formal prescription, only the gypsy, the potter, the washerman, and such like folk, out-caste or of low caste, will mount or own the ass. This prescription, and the ridiculous Hindu association of the donkey with the goddess of smallpox, account for the universal dislike and disdain in which this most useful, sagacious, and estimable animal is held. He is never fed by his owners, and his chronic hunger is mocked by a popular saying that to feed a donkey is neither sin nor sacrifice:—"na pâp na pŭn." A dozen popular Indian versions of "casting pearls before swine" derisively offer cakes, sweetmeats, bread, sugar, saffron, ghi, and curry-combs to the ass, and it has entered into no one's mind to conceive the simple truth that he has deserved them all. Also, with bitter irony, he is said to be always in good case whatever the season—because in the hot, dry weather, when he looks about on the burnt-up plain, he brays with glee—saying:—"This is vastly well! I must be fat since I have eaten up all the grass." While in the rains he brays and says:—"I shall never get through all this fodder." As a joke this popular gibe is beneath contempt, while as an imputation on the donkey's sense it is wholly unwarranted. A purely idiotic and unaccountable fancy is that if one walks over the place where a donkey has rolled he will have pains in his feet or be smitten with paralysis. The Arab superstition recorded by Al Masudi, that ghouls have asses' feet, may have some share in the notion, for in the East ghouls are still alive and have a natural history of their own.

It may not be very painful, but the slitting of the poor creature's nostrils, almost universal in India, and meant to soften the clangour of his voice, has always seemed to me a monstrous affectation of delicacy of ear on the part of people who delight in the tom-tom and the pipe, while it gives a tattered and woe-begone air to a countenance already sufficiently marked with dejection. Nor is it of the least use, for that stormy music, "loud and clear," rings with unabated force in spite of the hideous mutilation. Mr. Villiers Stuart of Dromana mentions an ancient Egyptian wall-picture of a driver trying to stop his donkey when in full bray. The Speaker of the House of Commons in wig and robe may at times succeed in staunching the human,—but nothing short of decapitation would avail to silence the equine ass until that final sound, most like the spasm of a church organ when the wind fails, is reached. And when they slit the nostrils, they proceed in mere wantonness of brutality to split the ears also. For this there can be no reason. It is impossible to write in measured phrase of these cruel tricks, but those who dream of Oriental loving-kindness should be told that they have been practised for centuries, and are still unnoticed and unrebuked.

His very name, Gădha—the roarer,—is a reproach. Some Muhammadans have an idea that the donkey sees the devil when he brays, possibly because of the belief that it was he who introduced the Father of Evil into the Ark. When Hăzrăt Nuh (the worshipful Noah) was marshalling the animals into the Ark, the donkey, as is his modest wont, held back. "Nay then, go along!" said Noah; but the ass did not move. Then the Patriarch lost his temper, for the time was short and the clouds were gathering, and he cried, "Go on and may the Devil go with thee!" When the door was shut Noah met the Evil One inside and asked how he came there. "Surely then," replied that Wicked One, "I came by your honour's invitation." If there is a moral in this absurdity, it is that when holy men lose their tempers they open the door to sin; but in some topsy-turvy way, possible only to Oriental thought, the obloquy of the anecdote falls on the innocent ass. If injurious reflections and vile phrases were all he had to bear, there would not be much cause for complaint, but it is hard to write with patience of the constant and cruel beating the poor creature receives.

The race, through centuries of ill-usage, is stunted and weak; and the brutal rule seems to be that to the smallest ass shall go the biggest stick. It is just possible by taking the cudgel from the ass-driver's hand and applying it lustily to his back to convey to his mind some glimmering of an idea that the blows he finds hard to bear may perhaps be painful to the ass. No mere words avail to suggest this new and strange notion. The evangel of kindness to God's creatures can scarcely, however, be spread by missionaries with thick sticks; and for many a year to come the portion of the ass must be starvation and ill-usage. A folk-tale which accounts for the popular saying "As brave as the potter's wife" bears unintentional testimony to the way in which the ass is beaten. One cold dark night a potter and his wife were roused from sleep by sounds in the yard outside and the fall of pipkins. "Get up, man!" said the wife, "and drive the donkey away." But being warm, snug, and sleepy, he replied, "Bother the donkey!" and pulled the blanket over his shoulders. Thereupon, uttering some truisms of world-wide acceptation on the selfishness of husbands, the good wife arose, and seizing the potter's staff sallied out to bestow on the intruder's back all the resentment caused by her husband's laziness. She laid on with a will and the beast was still. So she went to bed again, muttering more truths. But in the morning when they opened the door they found no donkey, but a tiger, which the good woman had unwittingly beaten to death in the dark. The potter and his donkey have originated one of the many ironical gibes of the country. A traveller met two horsemen richly attired, and, a little farther on, a potter jogging along on his ass. He asked the latter who the cavaliers might be. "We three gentlemen are going to Delhi," said the potter, and this speech is murmured when a man brags of the fine company he keeps.

THE POTTER AND HIS DONKEY

The black mark set against the ass by Hindu superstition from his association with Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, has already been noticed. This awful divinity is one of the ten manifestations of Durga or Kali the Destroyer, and is suspected of having entered the Hindu pantheon from the lower levels of aboriginal superstition. She is dreaded by all, but her worship, which is never performed during an epidemic of smallpox, seems to be confined to women and children, who flock to her shrines in thousands and sometimes throw a few grains of pulse to the ass.[1] But the poor creature draws no real profit from his appointment to be her vâhan—vehicle or steed. The bull, on the other hand, as the vâhan of Mahadeo or Shiva, often enjoys a full-fed freedom, and those led about by Hindu beggars are known as nandi, "the happy one," the name given to the carven stone bull in front of Hindu temples and to the small brass bull which supports the canopy over a domestic shiv.

[1] Mr. Ibbetson writes, in his Outlines of Punjab Ethnography, "These deities (of disease) are never worshipped by men, but only by women and children, enormous numbers of whom attend the shrines of renown on Sitala's seventh. Every village has its local shrine too, at which the offerings are all impure. Sitala rides on a donkey, and grain is given to the donkey and to his master the potter, after being waved over the head of the child. Fowls, pigs, goats are offered, black dogs are fed, and white cocks are waved and let loose. An adult who has recovered from smallpox should let a pig loose to Sitala or he will be again attacked. During an attack no offerings are made, and if the epidemic has once seized on a village all worship is discontinued till the disease has disappeared; but so long as she keeps her hands off nothing is too good for the goddess, for she is the one great dread of Indian mothers."

In the days of rough-and-ready Qâzi justice, criminals were frequently sentenced to be shaven and blackened and to be paraded, with their clothes rent, through the city, mounted on asses, with their faces tailwards, and a garland of old shoes round their necks. An old Sikh of my acquaintance has seen this punishment inflicted, with the addition, in the case of thieves, of the loss of hands, ears, or noses. In Mussulman countries farther west the penalty is still applied. Even now, in remote Indian villages, a noxious person is occasionally treated to a donkey ride of this kind, with a noisy accompaniment of beaten pans. In the similar "skimmity ride" of the south of England, described in Mr. Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, effigies of the offending persons are paraded on the backs of asses. As an example of utter shamelessness they tell of offenders who, after the performance, calmly demand the donkey as their perquisite. In folk-tales unfaithful wives have their noses cut off and are paraded on donkey-back. Nose-cutting, by the way, as in the days of the Hitopadesa, is the punishment still awarded by popular sentiment in India to conjugal infidelity, and not a week passes without a case of this horror, in our police courts; but it is only the woman's nose which suffers, and the greater part of these barbarities never comes to light.

There are evidences of a quaint ritual of obloquy in which the honest donkey was made to take part. When it was decided that a site was infamous for some sacro-sanct Hindu reason, it was formally ploughed up and asses were yoked to the plough. But a re-consecration was possible, and then the lordly elephant dragged the plough. "May your homestead be ploughed by asses" is still a common Hindu curse.

The ass has been made to serve in the conflicts of race and creed which still divide India. Before the establishment of British rule the Hindus on the North-West frontier, where Muhammadan authority was paramount, were not allowed to wear full-size turbans, and might ride asses only. In the independent state of Cutch Bhūj, on the other hand, where the rulers are Hindus, the Muhammadan Borahs were forbidden to ride on horseback, a disability which has only just been removed (1890). The Borahs, on whom this indignity has for so long been laid, are not, as might be imagined, low-caste folk of no consideration, but include among them some of the most intelligent, public-spirited, and wealthy men in the Bombay Presidency. The Muhammadan is perhaps, in matters of this kind, more tyrannical and intolerant than the Hindu. At this moment the Jews in some parts of Morocco may only ride on asses, with their faces tailwards, and they may not wear shoes.

That caste pride is as strong among people of low estate as in the upper ranks is a commonplace everywhere. Indian grooms of the leather-dresser tribes are supposed to be of low degree; but when a lady of my acquaintance proposed to get a donkey for her little son she learned a lesson in this subject from one of her horse-keepers: "No, madam, my son shall never wait on an ass. You must get a potter's brat for him, and he must not come near our stable."

India follows, or perhaps the East has led, other countries in the use of the donkey's name as a term of reproach. "Ass" is a common word in all contemptuous mouths, and "tailless ass" is an occasional enhancement of scorn. When a fool is praised by a fool they say, "Ass scratches ass," and a similar saying expresses the arts of log-rolling intrigues with homely force. For the sake of ricochet shots at fools the poor beast is insulted by comparisons which would never occur to his humble mind, as "Wash an ass as much as you like, you will never make a calf of him," or "Bray him in a mortar, but he will never be a horse." Muhammadans say, "If even the ass of Jesus went to Mecca he would still come back an ass." The obstinacy born of ill-usage, which is his only fault, points many a gibe. As an illustration of Afghān character a folk-tale tells that at a Punjab river ferry a crowd of passengers and animals were assembled. When the boat came, all went aboard without hesitation, excepting an ass, which refused to move. His driver pushed and the boatmen hauled without effect, until at last an Afghān among the waiting passengers drew his churra, the long and heavy Khyber knife, and smote the poor beast's head off at a blow, crying, "Obstinacy like this may be permitted to an Afghān, but to a donkey, never."

Among the Biloch, neighbours of the Afghān, this same obstinacy is honoured. Mr. Ibbetson writes in his Punjab Ethnography, "When a male child is born, asses' dung in water, symbolical of pertinacity, is dropped into his mouth from the point of a sword before he is given the breast." Antipathies of race and region, calmly ignored by those who write of "the people of India" as one and indivisible, find expression in sayings wherein the donkey takes part. A Hindustani will say of a Punjabi, "A country donkey with a Punjab bray"; and the Punjabi retaliates with, "A country donkey with an Eastern limp"; while of the Bengali Baboo, who affects English speech and manners, they say, "A hill jackass with an English bray."

Yet while the animal is despised the nutritive value of its milk is recognised. The potter and his family grow strong at the expense of the ass foal, and the high-caste Hindu pretends to be horrified by such an abomination. Vemana, a sage whose sayings take a high rank in Telugu literature, says, "A single spoonful of milk from a good cow is enough—of what use is a pailful of asses' milk?" Most Hindus would say that the use of this fluid is impossible under any circumstances. None the less is it accounted a valuable medicine by Hindu doctors, who on occasion put caste laws aside and compound mixtures, compared with which the most loathsome messes set forth in "Saxon leechdoms" are what our English druggists would call elegant prescriptions. Asses' milk is prescribed for a tendency to phthisis and other diseases, but usually at too late a stage to be of any use.

In some regions the donkey enjoys a moment's honour as the steed of Sitala; for a bridegroom about to start in the marriage procession will mount an ass for an instant, as a propitiation to the dread goddess. In customary talk, however, there are but few sayings which treat him with any touch of consideration. The "donkey's beauty" of Italian and French proverb has an equivalent in "Even a she-ass is pretty when she is young." The creature's sureness of foot is admitted in "A donkey will tumble down hill when you can split a fowl's ear." The poor wretch is turned loose when his work is done to that forlorn freedom of neglect which is the only privilege of the outcast. So they say in varying forms of phrase, "The donkey may be sore with beating, despised of all men and accursed as the vâhan of Sitala, but at least he is never plagued with tether or heel-rope." Some alleviation is granted even to the most abject misery.

There is a more complete harmony with the topsy-turvy scheme of Oriental appreciations than can be imagined by untravelled folk in the fact that while the ass is the most despised of creatures he is one of the most useful. There are regions where he is yoked to the plough, but his principal occupation is carrying clothes for the washerman, and earth, burnt and unburnt lime, and stone for the potter, the builder, and the railway contractor. Your great works in the West are built by strong-armed men, but in India railway bank, water-works dam, and Queen's highway are raised by the slender cooly woman and the little donkey. His step is first in the peaceful halls which mark the new civilisation, but his loads are too heavy for his weak limbs, his rude harness seems to be expressly contrived to gall and wound him, his life is one long martyrdom to the stick, and he is shamefully abandoned to starve and die when his strength fails. According to a country tale, similar to one told by Longfellow in his Tales of a Wayside Inn, there was once an Indian ruler who took compassion on a donkey. The Emperor Jehanghir caused a bell to be slung over his couch which might be rung by any petitioner with a wrong to redress. One day it was found that a castaway ass, rubbing his sore hide against the bell-rope, had rung a peal. The creature was haled before the throne, and search was made for its master, a washerman, who confessed that he had abandoned it to starve and die. The Emperor gave him a lecture on his cruelty, and ordered him to take back his faithful servant to be fed and cherished and to appear again before him after a season. That one donkey was groomed and fed as never ass before or since and brought sleek and fat into the august presence; but the example has borne no fruit, and the grim "burial of an ass" described by the prophet Jeremiah succeeds a lingering death by starvation.

CHAPTER V

OF GOATS AND SHEEP

"They killed a child to please the Gods
In earth's young penitence,
And I have bled in that babe's stead
Because of innocence."

"I bear the sins of sinful men
That have no sin of my own;
They drive me forth to Heaven's wrath
Unpastured and alone."

"I am the meat of sacrifice,
The ransom of man's guilt,
For they give my life to the altar knife,
Wherever shrine is built."

R. K.

A HINDU SACRIFICIAL KNIFE

here is no house possessing a goat but a blessing abideth thereon; and there is no house possessing three goats but the angels pass the night there praying," said Muhammad. And truly, if the animals of India had creeds like the people, goats would be of Islám; for though a vast proportion of the population, including Hindus, possess a goat or two and eat their flesh, it is mostly Moslems who keep them in flocks and trade in them. There is something too in appearances. The Brahminy bull looks every inch a Hindu; and the goat, to accustomed eyes, has no less decided a Muhammadan air.

Immense numbers of he-goats are sacrificed by Hindus, principally to the goddess Kali, one of the manifestations of Durga; and the practice is to decapitate them at a blow with a heavy bill-hook-shaped knife. It is supposed, indeed, that only animals slaughtered in this fashion are fit for Hindu food. For many years a goat has been sacrificed daily at a temple within the precincts of the old palace at Ambér, the former capital of the Jeypore state in Rajputana; and here, as in some other places, the tradition is that the goat is a substitute for a human sacrifice once regularly offered. In some parts of India, Hindus say, "The goat gets its own tail," a saying based on a local sacrificial usage. Each limb of the sacrifice belongs to a deity. The tail is assigned to Vishnu, who only can save. This part is therefore cut off and put into its mouth, so that at least the creature gets salvation, and presumably has less cause of objection to death. The Muhammadan halāl custom involves a sort of verbal apology to the creature slain, with a prayer; and, like the Hindu custom, seems to acknowledge that it also has a soul. Some Muhammadans kill a goat by way of sacrifice soon after the birth of a man child, and when a child is sick. The throat is cut with the usual invocation, pronounced by a Moollah.

A DOMESTIC SACRIFICE (MUHAMMADAN)

We say in derision of hasty vows, "When the devil was sick," etc.: in India they mutter, "If I get safe across I'll offer a goat." The story goes that a Meo, one of the crocodile-eating river-side tribesmen, made this promise when starting to cross the Ganges in flood; but when half-way over he found it less dangerous than he had feared, so instead of a goat he vowed to sacrifice a hen. When he had fairly won over, even the fowl seemed too much to give, so he sought for an insect among his clothing. This was easily found, and as he crushed it he said, "A life for a life, and that's enough."

In the hill districts of the Punjab the ancient idea still prevails that the sacrifice is not efficacious unless the animal first shivers. Thus, during the marriage progress of a hill-chief a goat is sacrificed at bridges and dangerous passes, and the long train waits contentedly until the creature shivers. The Brahmans, if so disposed, hasten the tremor by dashing a handful of cold water into the goat's ear, and thus produce a quite satisfactory shiver. In Kulu, a hill province bordering on Tibet, when two men have a difference which would lead elsewhere to a costly law-suit, each leads a goat to a shrine at Nuggur, the chief town, and waits to see which beast shivers first. The owner of that goat wins his case, and the contending parties go home content with a divine judgment for which no lawyer's fees have been paid. But in these cases they do not use the cold douche.

So far as I know, belief in the shivering goat as a favourable omen is confined to the hills, and it is particularly strong in Tibet. It was consulted with disastrous effect to the Tibetans in the recent Sikkim war just before they attacked our forces on the pass above Chumbi on the road into Sikkim.

The goat and the kid are the staple of the flesh food of the Muhammadans all over the East, and also of many Hindu castes, in Northern India especially. It is a fact that while the vegetarian craze is said to be spreading in the West, the use of goats and sheep as food is increasing in India,—popularly supposed to be given up to vegetarianism, even among Brahmanical castes. Throughout Hindustan proper and the Punjab, where contact with Islám has softened the edges of Hinduism, flesh food has been eaten by Hindus for centuries. By men, that is to say, for Hindu women very rarely taste it. Many more things besides flesh meat are considered too strong and good for mere women. Increasing prosperity is at the bottom of such change as is taking place, and probably the silent force of example counts for something. Hindus have said to me at times, "You English do not suffer so much from fever as we do because you eat flesh meat," and "Your eyesight is strong because you eat plenty of meat." This last might be based on observation of flesh-eating birds, but I doubt it. There is, however, a popular saying which forcibly expresses an estimate of the virtue of meat: "The butcher's daughter bears a son when she is ten years old." The home-keeping brother of the Prodigal Son complained that his father never gave him even a kid to make merry with his friends. Phrases like this which sound strange to town-bred Western ears, occur here in everyday talk. Servants on the march are made happy with a present of kids, and the festal days at the close of the long fast of the Muhammadan Ramazān are red with the slaughter of countless goats. The Englishman in India seldom wittingly eats goat or kid, but often in remote posting houses and in camp his mutton cutlet was originally goat. The native prefers kid before mutton, because the goat is a scrupulously clean feeder, while a hungry sheep will eat anything.

It would seem difficult to be cruel to a goat, but the keepers of the flocks of milch goats regularly driven morning and evening into Indian cities contrive to inflict a good deal of pain. The nipples of the udder are tied up in a torturing fashion, and there is an unnecessary use of the staff. But the worst cruelty is the practice of flaying them alive in the belief that skins thus prepared have a better quality. The Calcutta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals prosecuted twenty-two criminals for this offence in 1890, and is now inclined to hope the practice is dying out so far as the capital of Bengal is concerned.

ON THE DUSTY HIGHWAY

There are many sayings about goats, but the animal appears to be less suggestive than might be expected. The wilfulness of the creature and his habit of trespass are hinted in "Nothing to bother you, eh?—then go and buy a goat!" A gibe at the greed of saintly people is expressed in verse:—

"My Lord, the goat a saint would be,
His pupil was a cotton tree,
And quickly nibbled up was he."

The bearded Moollah of the mosque also has the goat cast offensively in his teeth. "You were moved by my discourse, I trust it will do you good," says the Moollah. "Yes," replies the countryman, "I could have wept, for when you wagged your beard in the pulpit you were just like our old billy-goat." This is also a European story. For "great cry and little wool" rustics say, "The goat bleated all night and produced only one kid,"—two being the usual number.

In folk-tales holy places are discovered by the milch goats coming home dry. It was found they had let down their milk on some sacred spot on which a temple or shrine is afterwards raised. Many out-of-the-way Hindu shrines are accounted for in this way. In other stories goats lead the way to caves tenanted by mystic immortals of miraculous powers. A quaint belief is that in dry desert places where wells formerly existed goats will group themselves in a circle round the ancient well brink, though not a trace of it is visible to the keenest human eye. Those who sketch animals may have noticed that goats at rest have a way of grouping themselves as if posing for their portraits. It is possible that this unconscious trick is at the bottom of the well-brink belief. So far as I know there are no sayings which notice the fine carriage of the head and the elegant horse-like gait of this beautiful animal. The Indian goat as a rule is much taller and of more slender build than the European animal.

From an administrative and economic point of view there are serious objections to the goat, which is one of the plagues of the Forest Department of the Government. It is the poor man's animal and is supposed to cost nothing to keep. Every green shoot is nibbled off as soon as it peeps above the ground, and young trees are promptly destroyed by creatures which spend half their time on their hind legs and have an effective reach up to the height of a man's head. Thus large tracts which nature is ready to clothe with vegetation are kept barren, and new forests carefully nursed by the provident state are devastated. Many more are kept than the land can carry. The creatures really belong to the purely pastoral scheme of life, and to the barren hillside, and are out of place in agricultural areas, which are increasing yearly, and may be regarded as at once a sign and a cause of unthrifty poverty and land-leanness.

MILCH GOATS

The goat's trick of picking up stray trifles is sometimes inconvenient. A Bengal saying runs, "What will not a goat eat or a fool say?" Two native merchants in Bombay were concluding a bargain, and while making payment a currency note for a thousand rupees fluttered to the ground and was promptly eaten by a goat.

A GUILTY GOAT

The receiver contended that the note had never reached him and the loss was not his, while the other insisted that it was the fault of the receiver's carelessness. A hasty Englishman might have insisted on a sudden autopsy of the goat, but these were high-caste Hindus, who never dreamed of such a thing, so they led the criminal between them to the Government Treasury, where, after due inquiry, I believe the loss was made good.

After death the goat seems to be as much with us as in life, for his skin, carefully withdrawn for this purpose, is borne as a water-vessel by the bhisti or water-carrier, and there are few more complete examples of adaptation. The legs, sewn up, form perfect attachments for the strap by which the bag is slung on the water-carrier's back, and the throat, which is a convenient neck to the huge bottle, is ingeniously closed by a thong, and is so supple that the bhisti can direct a thin stream into the mouth or hand of a thirsty passenger, or fill a decanter without spilling a drop, or water a road with a far-reaching spray like that of a watering-cart, or empty his burden into a bath-tub or a mortar-heap in a trice. Bhisti really means a person from Paradise, a prince, and is one of the half-ironical titles, like khalifa or caliph for a tailor, mehter or prince for a scavenger, thakur or lord for a barber, and raj or royal one for the bricklayer or mason, bestowed may be in time past as an acknowledgment of the dignity of labour; but a little English child will often say, "Here comes the bhisti with his beast!" It is a rather pitiful beast, more like a porpoise than a goat; yet at times when lying distended on the well-block, with the leg-stumps in the air, and the man pausing a moment to straighten his back before taking it up, I have thought a Levite at the altars of Israel may have looked like this.

THE GOAT-SKIN WATERBAG (MASHK)

The makers of goat-skin bags have a curious skill in flaying. One of them once brought me a soft and glossy black kid skin cured with the hair on. "What is this?" "Wait and see, sir," said he with a smile, and producing a reed, he proceeded to inflate the skin in the manner described by Don Miguel de Cervantes. A plump but not too shapely kid, with feet, ears, and even eyes (in glass) complete, resulted, nor could I find a trace of a seam. "Would not this be a fine thing for the 'wonder house'?" (native name for museum). As a museum specimen it was scarcely eligible, but to this moment I have no idea how it was done.

In Europe the goat is associated with the vine. The Bible has familiarised us with the use of its skin as a wine-bag or "bottle," and it is still used for this purpose in Spain and Cyprus. The Athenians during the festival of Dionysus made a pretty game,—Ascoliasmus,—of leaping and dancing barefoot on a wine-filled goat-skin smeared with oil. India is too temperate for such high jinks, and puts no wine into skin bottles, for it makes none. A dren is a sort of raft made of goat or deer-skins inflated with air, astride on which is uneasily fixed a cot bedstead. This serves as a ferry-boat, and is used for descending hill-streams, the legs and arms of the men in charge serving as oars and rudder. I have seen a gracious lady of strong nerve, sitting serenely aloft on a contrivance of this kind, attended by splashing bronze mermen, go gaily down a brawling river like a new Amphitrite. When filled with water merely, the goat-skin or "mashk" is a characteristic object. There is a story of an aide-de-camp in Simla who, when walking up hill in full uniform behind a water-carrier on whose back a newly filled "mashk" glistened plump in the sunshine, yielded to a temptation that many have felt, and drawing his too-ready sword slashed the thing open. It had not occurred to him that the "mashk" was full of dirty water for road watering, nor that the whole contents would burst over him in a cataract and utterly ruin his brave attire. One pays dearly sometimes for the gratification of sudden impulses.

BHISTI, OR WATER-CARRIER

In the Himálaya, flour and other food borne on a journey or brought home from the shop are carried in a goat-skin bag which always forms a part of the equipment of the hill peasant. When in accordance with an ancient custom, men are impressed as porters or to work on the roads, as in the French corvée—a blanket and a skin full of flour seem to be all they take with them for an absence of three or four days on the hillside. These are Hindus, but down in India proper no Hindu would put his food in a leathern bag. There are many Hindus, indeed, who will not drink water from the water-carrier's bag, and it were well if all shared this prejudice, for, though undeniably handy and useful, it cannot be called a wholesome contrivance. "Pipe-water," i.e. the tap-water now being introduced into most large Indian towns, besides lowering the death-rate and increasing the comfort of the inhabitants, has already lessened and will further reduce the number of water-carriers.

It is only in India and Peru that the sheep is used as a beast of burden. Borax, asafetida, and other commodities are brought in bags on the backs of sheep driven in large flocks from Tibet into British territory. One of the sensations of journeying in the hills of "the interior," as the farther recesses of the mountains are called by Anglo-Indians, is to come suddenly on such a drove as it winds, with the multitudinous click of little feet, round the shoulder of some Himálayan spur. The coarse hair bags scrape the cliff side from which the narrow path is out-built or hollowed, and allow but scant room for your pony, startled by the unexpected sight and the quick breathing hurry of the creatures as they crowd and scuffle past. Only the picturesque shepherds return from these journeys, for the carriers of the caravan, feeding as they go, gather flesh in spite of their burdens and provide most excellent mutton.

A SPORTING MAN

Sheep are numerous in India, but they are seldom kept by the cultivator or farmer, for the combination of agricultural with pastoral life, common in other countries, is almost unknown. In the towns of the plains rams are kept as fighting animals, and the sport is a source of gratification to many. A Muhammadan "buck" going out for a stroll with his fighting ram makes a picture of point-device foppery not easily surpassed by the sporting fancy of the West. The ram is neatly clipped, with a judicious reservation of salient tufts touched with saffron and mauve dyes, and besides a necklace of large blue beads, it bears a collar of hawk-bells. Its master wears loosely round his neck or on his shoulders a large handkerchief of the brightest colours procurable, his vest is of scarlet or sky-blue satin embroidered with colour and gold, his slender legs are encased in skin-tight drawers, a gold-embroidered cap is poised on one side of his head, his long, black hair, parted in the middle and shining with scented hair-oil, is sleeked behind his ears, where it has a drake's tail curl which throws in relief his gold earrings, and in addition to two or three necklaces, he usually wears a gold chain. Patent leather shoes and a cane complete the costume. As he first affronts the sunshine, he looks undeniably smart, but his return, I have observed, is not always so triumphant. The ram naturally loses interest in a stroll which has not another ram in perspective, and it is not easy to preserve an air of distinction when angrily propelling homeward a heavy and reluctant sheep.

The great God Indra rides on a ram, but, for the bulk of the people, Indra has been dead for many a day.

CHAPTER VI

OF COWS AND OXEN

"By those dumb mouths be ye forgiven
Ere ye are heard pleading with Heaven."

Sir E. Arnold.

A BOMBAY MILK WOMAN

n Europe it is a half-forgotten legend that flocks and herds ranked first among early forms of wealth, and it is only in dissertations on the origin of money we are reminded that the root of pecuniary is pecus. But in agricultural and pastoral India, dependent on cattle for milk and labour, and on sheep and goats for flesh-meat, a hundred sayings, echoes of the now forgotten prayers of the Vedic hymns, repeat the ancient estimates of cattle. One of the first sensations of the tourist in India is the ubiquity of the bull, the cow, and the ox. They are, in fact, foremost figures in both the rustic and urban scenery of the country. Yet Lord Macaulay, when painting this scenery for English readers, set down everything but its most essential and familiar features. There is a splendid picture in his essay on Warren Hastings, where the rich oriental detail of palm-trees, idols, elephants, maidens with pitchers, and the rest, is like a profusion of jewels set in florid beaten work of gilded metal, but the cow and ox were not thought fine enough for the place in letters that they own in life.

The people have a passion,—no other word is strong enough,—for the possession of cattle. Indian cities, full of folk, are also vast cow byres or mistals, and hitherto sanitary reform has not ventured to interfere. The cattle come and go at their own pleasure, and rub shoulders with humanity with an ineffable air of security and fellowship. Nearly everybody is, or thinks he is, a judge of a cow; there is no more popular subject of discourse and none with so copious a terminology. Every possible and some apparently impossible varieties of form and colour; of hair, horn, tail, udder, dewlap, hump, eyes, and limbs has its separate name or phrase.

The peculiar sanctity of the animal may be a degradation of a poetical Aryan idea, and the cow,—originally used as a symbol of the clouds attendant on the Sun-God,—may have succeeded by a process of materialisation to honours for which she was not intended, but she is now firmly enthroned in the Hindu pantheon. There is, indeed, a strong tendency among modern Hindus of the reforming order to re-affirm her sanctity as a national shibboleth, and to denounce cow-killing in the strongest terms. The beef-fed Briton who wishes to sympathise with the Hindu does not quite like to be thrust aside as one of the impure (Maleccha),—learning with some uneasiness that millions of most estimable people would sooner die than touch the roast-beef of Old England. The damning mark set against the English admits of but faint extenuation. They have done justice and loved mercy, they have protected the lowly and weak, saved the widow from the fire, fed the famine-stricken, taught the ignorant, and made that a nation which was not a nation;—but they kill and eat the cow, and are therefore, in a levitical sense, abominable. The Muhammadan, however, is accounted worse, for he is of the people and among them; his creed is in opposition to theirs, and there are rankling memories of a thousand insults to it wrought on the sacred cow.

The Briton is an outland stranger from beyond the seven seas, he lives apart and knows no better; the Moslem eats beef in pure spite! This is manifestly unjust, but who can reason with a prejudice sanctioned by centuries of usage and tradition? At this moment cow-killing is the dangerous question of the country, always apt to provoke tumult and bloodshed. I have heard the agitation for total abstinence from intoxicating drink in the West mentioned as a parallel to the anti-cow-killing movement in India, but, though touched with a similar unreasonableness, teetotallers have hitherto refrained from breaking the heads of moderate drinkers.

But while surmising that the cow may have come to a place of honour from early and poetical association with myths of sun and cloud, it is possible to regard her dignity from a merely human and reasonable standpoint. Menu or other early law-givers may have proclaimed her sanctity as a means for her protection and preservation among a people careless of the future and prone to live on their capital. And with the same wise intention, the setting free as consecrated gifts of cattle sires (to be noticed hereafter), may have been ordained. At all events, these ordinances, in the absence of any scientific knowledge of breeding, have availed to preserve the cow. Nor is it unlikely that they rescued her from extinction, for it is clear that beef was a popular food when some of the ancient Vedas were written. It would not be hard to show that the same Aryan appreciation of roast beef has served in the West to develop and improve cattle breeding, but you will not easily persuade the modern Hindu of this fact. The establishment of an aristocracy of Brahmans was another stroke of practical wisdom; but the days when a class can be maintained aloft by formal prescription merely, seem to be passing away all the world over.

It is not easy to select instances that shall make clear to foreign readers the Hindu reverence for the cow and the place that her protection from death holds as a sacramental ordinance. In Indian history the slaughter of cows by impious and impure persons has often been the beginning of battle, murder, and sudden death. The chronicles of every State are full of retaliations for cow-murder, and in every local riot Hindu vengeance is first wreaked on the Muhammadan beef-butcher. Respect for the cow and loathing for the pig are the alpha and omega of the faith of thousands of Hindus and Moslems of the lower orders. In purely Hindu States and in Kashmir, where a Muhammadan population is ruled by a few Hindus, the punishment officially awarded for killing a cow is death, and there are cases on record where whole families have suffered death on suspicion of the offence. The fat of the cow was said to be used in making a newly-introduced cartridge, and so became an excuse for the Sepoy mutiny. The cry most frequently raised by the Sikhs against the English in the days before the annexation of the Punjab was that they defiled the country by the slaughter of kine. And it was probably this cry that most availed to raise the armies of the Punjab against us, for the Sikhs, like other reformed Hindus, have jealously preserved the cow as an object of reverence. One of the customary phrases used when pleading for mercy from a creditor or a person in power is, "You are a Brahman, I am a cow." That is to say, extend to me the same kind treatment that a cow receives.

In ordinary domestic life a Hindu who has accidentally killed a cow voluntarily undergoes a painful penance. He is at once put out of caste and must repair to the Ganges, no matter how long and toilsome the journey may be. He must carry the cow's tail aloft at the end of a long staff, crying aloud when approached so that all may avoid him as pollution incarnate. He may not enter a village, but food is brought out to him when he halts on his march. Arrived at the sacred river, he must pay fees, which he can frequently but ill afford, to Brahmans for purifying rites, and he must eat and drink the five sacrificial products of the cow, which are not milk and butter merely, and do not include beef.

But it is no crime to allow a barren and useless cow to die, nor is it wrong to starve a male calf to death. And cow-murder, in spite of all ordinances, is one of the commonest offences of rustic life. The leather-dressers are a low caste of Hindus whose business is to skin the bodies of dead animals, which skins are their rightful perquisite. Leather is yearly increasing in value, and this low caste seems likely to rise. One speaks of low-caste people in deference to common usage, but Western readers will, I trust, be slow to believe that whole races of mankind are to be condemned to perpetual degradation because of their trade, or the official position it occupied in the once admirable Indian scheme. Among these so-called low castes there is often a complete organisation, a priesthood and in some sort an aristocracy; and their caste disputes are just as intricate and jealous of points of honour as those of the "twice born" folk. Nor is there any need to disguise the fact that the gift of freedom bestowed for the first time on India by the British Government includes the gradual alleviation of the disabilities of low degree, under which so many of the people have lain for ages. The change is coming about without shock to the general system, and is one of the inevitable results of education and life under free institutions. Some of the best artists and craftsmen in India are of low caste, and there are those who resent their rise in life, but it is coming as surely as to-morrow's dawn.

The leather-dressers, then, who take the skins of animals which divide the hoof, consider themselves superior to those who skin horses and camels. They are a most useful and laborious class; and, with education, will make valuable citizens in time, but they have been known to hasten Nature's course by poisoning the cattle of the villagers among whom they live. With curious casuistry they persuaded themselves that it was not cow-murder to insert a skilfully poisoned thorn under the skin of an animal to cause a lingering death, nor to drop poisoned food within its reach, for they also were Hindus and could not kill a cow outright. These are not exceptional practices, for in one prison at one time fifteen hundred leather-dressers have been confined for cattle poisoning. Hindu villagers have been known to make "transactions" with their dangerous neighbours. When the cattle were mysteriously dying (though the cause was no mystery), they summoned a council and asked the leather-dressers for their opinion on the mortality. The leather-dressers gravely replied that the village godlings, especially those of their own peculiar caste, had been neglected, and that it would be well to propitiate them. So a feast was made to the leather-dressers, and their godlings were propitiated by offerings; both sides going through an elaborate semi-religious farce with perfect gravity. Then the deaths would cease for a time. There is a class of English medical officers known as Chemical Examiners to Government, whose researches have largely contributed to the detection and conviction of the cattle poisoners who for centuries have taken a heavy toll on the beast life of the land. Many of the tricks they have exposed must have been well known to the people, but even those who had suffered most were reluctant to tell all they knew. A curious sign of the changing time is the fact that Hindus of good caste, seeing the profit that may be made from leather, are quietly creeping into a business from which they are levitically barred. Money prevails against caste more potently than missionary preaching.

The elaborate damnations ordained by Brahmanical authority for cow-killing will appear monstrous to a future generation of Hindus. Europeans smile no less at their assumption of knowledge of the future than at their grotesque accumulation of horrors and their amazing arrogance, but they are still real and awful to the uneducated Hindu, in spite of his ingrained distrust of Brahmans. One of the characteristic contrasts of native life is the contempt expressed in popular sayings for priestly authority, and the actual respect it receives. Cows are to be given to Brahmans, but they say: "When the cow goes dry or barren she is good enough for the Brahman," or "a one-eyed cow is a Brahman's gift." A black cow is thought to be the most acceptable, but the Brahman of to-day cannot afford to be particular. Of the idle wandering jogi, on the other hand, it is said "even the care of a cow is a bother to him."

The bull receives high honours as the vâhan or steed of Shiva, and as such is known as Nandi, the happy one. This name belongs also to the carven stone bull which sits in state before the temples of Mahadeo or Siva, while the small brazen bull forming part of an arrangement for the lustration of a domestic Shiv or phallic emblem is known as Nandigan. Hindu devotees who lead about bulls marked with Sivite emblems and supposed to be consecrated to Mahadeo are called Anandis. In ordinary life the respect for the bull finds quaint expression at times. A friend of mine was the owner of a fine sire of a choice breed, which he sent to fairs and cattle shows, where frequently some devout old woman would hang a garland of marigolds round its neck and go through the familiar actions of worship.