Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/222

 natives, and extorting money from them as an inducement to go elsewhere.

14. IMPURE WATER.—No part of diet is more generally objectionable than the water they drink. One would expect that the natives of India, so excessively careful of defilement in their manner of eating and drinking, would be very particular about their water, their only beverage;and that nothing less than distilled water from the spring, or rain water from the clouds, would satisfy them; but no nation is so notoriously indifferent about the water they drink.

If we visit any of the legitimate places for lifting water, any of the ghauts of the river, we shall see a dense mass of naked people of all ages and all sexes standing up to their waists in water; some washing their clothes, some their bodies, and all stirring up as much mud from the bottom as they can; yet when their ablutions are completed, filling their pitchers where they stand for the day's consumption; probably one of the common sewers of a bazar enters the river a few yards above the ghaut; and it may happen that the surface of the water is strewed with the yet warm ashes of some lately incinerated human being, or that a putrid carcase is revolving in au eddy adjacent. If we visit any of the private tanks we shall find a spacious pool of water shaded with trees and embroidered with weeds, the necessary