Page:The Garden of India.djvu/15

4 and made them bondsmen and herdsmen and hewers of wood and drawers of water, unto this day. There it lies, the great plain! a land of narrow fields and wide rivers, of open barren tracts, and great single trees, and dense mango groves, of jungle patches, and shallow reedy lakes, and dry watercourses, and rugged ravines worn by the rushing rain-torrents.

And what sort of life is it, you may ask, that is led by the scantily clad, dusky dwellers in those groups of mud-built, thatch-roofed, creeper-covered houses that dot the country so thickly—the men who are irrigating their fields from tank and channel, the children herding cattle on the bare-looking grazing-grounds, the women with their water vessels clustering round the village well ? And it must, I fear, be answered that theirs is, for the most part, a dim, slowly moving, and too often a poverty-stricken and hunger-bitten life, a life of small observances and petty superstitions, a narrow round of struggle with the rent-collector and the village usurer, enlivened only by the rare excitement of a marriage-feast, or a pilgrimage to some quasi-religious fair. They are a much-enduring, little-complaining race, these earth-tillers, "men to much misery and hardship born," who, blessed indeed in that they expect little, yet even of that little too often disappointed, wear away their lives from hand to mouth and year to year,

This is not a pleasant sketch of the condition of the rural masses of Oudh, but I do not think that it is, so far as it goes, an unfaithful one, or drawn in too sombre colours. "Tales of rustic happiness," as Coleridge has told us, are too often but