There is yet another small tolah or suburb, called the Kusbee tolah.  Here live the miserable outcasts who minister to the worst passions of our nature.  These degraded beings are banished from the more respectable portions of the community; but here, as in our own highly civilised and favoured land, vice hovers by the side of virtue, and the Hindoo village contains the same elements of happiness and misery, profligacy and probity, purity and degradation, as the fine home cities that are a name in the mouths of men.

Every village forms a perfect little commonwealth; it contains all the elements of self-existence; it is quite a little commune, so far as social life is concerned.  There is a hereditary blacksmith, washerman, potter, barber, and writer.  The dhobee, or washerman, can always be known by the propinquity of his donkeys, diminutive animals which he uses to transport his bundle of unsavoury dirty clothes to the pool or tank where the linen is washed.  On great country roads you may often see strings of donkeys laden with bags of grain, which they transport from far-away villages to the big bazaars; but if you see a laden donkey near a village, be sure the dhobee is not far off.

Here as elsewhere the hajam, or barber, is a great gossip, and generally a favourite.  He uses no soap, and has a most uncouth-looking razor, yet he shaves the heads, beards, moustaches, and armpits of his customers with great deftness.  The lower classes of natives shave the hair of the head and of the armpits for the sake of cleanliness and for other obvious reasons.  The higher classes are very regular in their ablutions; every morning, be the water cold or warm, the Rajpoot and Brahmin, the respectable middle classes, and all in the village who lay any claim to social position, have their goosal or bath.  Some hie to the nearest tank or stream; at all hours of the day, at any ferry or landing stage, you will see swarthy fine-looking fellows up to mid waist in the water, scrubbing vigorously their bronzed arms, and neck and chest.  They clean their teeth with the end of a stick, which they chew at one extremity, till they loosen the fibres, and with this improvised toothbrush and some wood ashes for paste, they make them look as white and clean as ivory.

There is generally a large masonry well in the middle of the village, with a broad smooth pucca platform all round it.  It has been built by some former father of the hamlet, to perpetuate his memory, to fulfil a vow to the gods, perhaps simply from goodwill to his fellow townsmen.  At all events there is generally one such in every village.  It is generally shadowed by a huge bhur, peepul, or tamarind tree.  Here may always be seen the busiest sight in the village.  Pretty young women chatter, laugh, and talk, and assume all sorts of picturesque attitudes as they fill their waterpots; the village matrons gossip, and sometimes quarrel, as they pull away at the windlass