can toddle they are sent to weed, cut grass, gather fuel, tend herds, or do anything that will bring them in a small pittance, and ease the burden of the struggling parents.  I think the children of the higher and middle classes very pretty; they have beautiful, dark, thoughtful eyes, and a most intelligent expression.  Very young babies however are miserably nursed; their hair is allowed to get all tangled and matted into unsightly knots; their faces are seldom washed, and their eyes are painted with antimony about the lids, and are often rheumy and running with water.  The use of the pocket handkerchief is sadly neglected.

There is generally one open space or long street in our village, and in a hamlet of any importance there is weekly or bi-weekly a bazaar or market.  From early morning in all directions, from solitary huts in the forest, from struggling little crofts in the rice lands, from fishermen’s dwellings perched on the bank of the river, from lonely camps in the grass jungle where the herd and his family live with their cattle, from all the petty Thorpes about, come the women with their baskets of vegetables, their bundles of spun yarn, their piece of woven cloth, whatever they have to sell or barter.  There is a lad with a pair of wooden shoes, which he has fashioned as he was tending the village cows; another with a grass mat, or bamboo staff, or some other strange outlandish-looking article, which he hopes to barter in the bazaar for something on which his heart is set.  The bunniahs hurry up their tottering, overladen ponies; the rice merchant twists his patient bullock’s tail to make it move faster; the cloth merchant with his bale under his arm and measuring stick in hand, walks briskly along.  Here comes a gang of charcoal-burners, with their loads of fuel slung on poles dangling from their shoulders.  A box wallah with his attendant coolie, staggering under the weight of a huge box of Manchester goods, hurries by.  It is a busy sight in the bazaar.  What a cackling!  What a confused clatter of voices!  Here also the women are the chief contributors to the din of tongues.  There is no irate husband here or moody master to tell them to be still.  Spread out on the ground are heaps of different grain, bags of flour, baskets of meal, pulse, or barley; sweetmeats occupy the attention of nearly all the buyers.  All Hindoos indulge in sweets, which take the place of beer with us; instead of a ‘nobbler,’ they offer you a ‘lollipop.’  Trinkets, beads, bracelets, armlets, and anklets of pewter, there are in great bunches; fruits, vegetables, sticks of cane, skins full of oil, and sugar, and treacle.  Stands with fresh ‘paun’ leaves, and piles of coarse looking masses of tobacco are largely patronised.  It is like a hive of bees.  The dust hovers over the moving mass; the smells are various, none of them ‘blest odours of sweet Araby.’  Drugs, condiments, spices, shoes, in fact, everything that a rustic population can require, is here.  The