It is rather a strange sight to see some four or five hundred coolies squatted in a long irregular line, chattering, laughing, shouting, or squabbling.  A dense cloud of dust rises over them, and through the dim obscurity one hears the ceaseless sound of the thwack! thwack! as their sticks rattle on the ground.  White dust lies thick on each swarthy skin; their faces are like faces in a pantomime.  There are the flashing eyes and the grinning rows of white teeth; all else is clouded in thick layers of dust, with black spots and stencillings showing here and there like a picture in sepia and chalk.  As they near the end of the field they redouble their thwacking, shuffle along like land-crabs, and while the Mates, Peons, and Tokedars shout at them to encourage them, they raise a roar loud enough to wake the dead.  The dust rises in denser clouds, the noise is deafening, a regular mad hurry-scurry, a wild boisterous scramble ensues, and amid much chaffing, noise, and laughter, they scramble off again to begin another length of land; and so the day’s work goes on.

The planter has to count his coolies several times a-day, or they would cheat him.  Some come in the morning, get counted, and their names put on the roll, and then go off till paytime comes round.  Some come for an hour or two, and send a relative in the evening when the pice are being paid out, to get the wage of work they have not done.  All are paid in pice—­little copper bits of coin, averaging about sixty-four to the rupee.  However, you soon come to know the coolies by sight, and after some experience are rarely ‘taken in,’ but many young beginners get ‘done’ most thoroughly till they become accustomed to the tricks of the artless and unsophisticated coolie.

The type of feature along a line of coolies is as a rule a very forbidding and degraded one.  They are mostly of the very poorest class.  Many of them are plainly half silly, or wholly idiotic; not a few are deaf and dumb; others are crippled or deformed, and numbers are leprous and scrofulous.  Numbers of them are afflicted in some districts with goitre, caused probably by bad drinking water; all have a pinched, withered, wan look, that tells of hard work and insufficient fare.  It is a pleasure to turn to the end of the line, where the Dangur women and boys and girls generally take their place.  Here are the loudest laughter, and the sauciest faces.  The children are merry, chubby, fat things, with well-distended stomachs and pleasant looks; a merry smile rippling over their broad fat cheeks as they slyly glance up at you.  The women—­with huge earrings in their ears, and a perfect load of heavy brass rings on their arms—­chatter away, make believe to be shy, and show off a thousand coquettish airs.  Their very toes are bedizened with brass rings; and long festoons of red, white, and blue beads hang pendent round their necks.