In a large hut among these shades, with bananas waving their banner leaves over the smooth and well-swept yard in front, where the children play, lives the family that cultivates the garden.  They are a sect of Brahmins, but very unbrahminical, unsophisticated, industrious, temperate, kind and hospitable.  Other Brahmins despise them and wish to deny them the name, because they have soiled their priestly hands with agriculture.  But they return the contempt, and walk in the way of their fathers, a way which leads them among the purest pleasures that this life affords and keeps them from many of its more sordid temptations.  Perhaps the picture has its darker shades too.  I have not seen them, and why should I look for them?

The betel nut harvest is something of the nature of an acrobatic performance, for the crop is not on the ground, but on poles forty or fifty feet high.  This is the manner in which it is gathered.  The farmer, attended by his wife, goes out, and slipping a loose loop of rope over his feet to keep them together, so that when he gets the trunk of a tree between them it may fit like a wedge, he clasps one of the trees with his hands and goes up at a surprising rate.  He carries with him a long rope, and when he reaches the top, he fastens one end of it to the tree, and throws the other to his wife, who goes to a distance and draws it tight.  Then the man breaks off a heavy bunch of ripe nuts, and hitching it on the rope lets it go.  It shoots down with such velocity that it would knock his wife down did she not know how to dodge it skilfully and break its force in a bend of the rope.

When all the bunches are on the ground, the man begins to sway his body violently till the tender and supple palm is swinging like a pendulum and almost striking the trees on either side.  Watching his opportunity, the man grasps one of these and transfers himself to it with the nimbleness of a monkey.  In this way he makes an aerial journey round the garden and avoids the fatigue of climbing up and down every separate tree.

The gathered betel nuts soon find their way to the warehouses of fat Bunias at the coast ports, where they are peeled and prepared and sorted and piled in great heaps according to quality, and finally shipped in pattimars and cotias and coasting steamers, and so disseminated over the length and breadth of the land to be the comforters of poor and rich.

It only remains to say that the betel nut is not used in the East for tooth-powder, though the natives believe that the practice of chewing it saves them from toothache.  When they use any dentifrice it is generally charcoal, and their toothbrush is either the forefinger or a fibrous stick chewed at the end till it becomes like a stiff paintbrush.  But whatever he may use for the purpose, the Hindu cleans his teeth every morning, and that most thoroughly, before he will allow food to pass his lips, and the whiteness and soundness of his teeth are an object of envy to Englishmen.