Page:Wanderings of a Pilgrim Vol 1.djvu/303

 table on which I am writing shook also. I became very sick and giddy, so much so, that I fancied I had fallen ill suddenly. When the noise and trembling ceased, I found I was quite well, and the giddy sickness went off. I never felt the earth quake before. Every one in the house was sensible of it. At the Circuit bungalow, nearly three miles off, it was felt as much as on the banks of the Jumna.

In a native family, if a person be ill, one of the relations takes a small earthen pan, filled with water, flowers, and rice, and places it in the middle of the road or street, in front of the house of the sick person, believing that if any one en passant should touch the offering, either by chance or design, the illness would quit the sufferer and cleave to the person who had touched the flowers or the little pan containing the offering. A native carefully steps aside and avoids coming in contact with the flowers.

To-day, a man was punished for perjury in this manner; he was mounted on a donkey, with his face to the tail of the animal; one half of his face was painted black, the other white, and around his neck was hung a necklace of old shoes and old bones. Surrounded by a mob of natives, with hideous music and shouts, he was paraded by the police all through the town! An excellent punishment.

Our farming operations commenced last September. On the banks of the Ganges, near the fort, we planted thirty beeghass? (see below)] with oats, and expect a crop sufficient to feed our horses and sheep, with plenty of straw to cut into bhoosa. The oats are not so large and heavy as those of England, nevertheless, very good. During the hot weather, we give our horses half oats half gram (chana?]); in the cold season, oats and carrots; the latter are remarkably fine, we purchase them by the beeghā. A beeghā, or bīghā, is a quantity of land, containing twenty katthās, or 120 feet square.

In Calcutta, oats are procurable in abundance, and are usually to be had at those stations where there are race-horses; but they are not generally cultivated, and where they are a novelty the natives speak of them as "wheat gone mad." At Allahabad,