week, each mine keeping a ‘Supply boy’ (servant), who goes in from Kolar Road (our railway station, seven miles from the mines), and returns the following day.  We get mutton and beef from the local butcher, and also good bread from the bakery on the field.  Our butter comes from Bangalore, and from there we obtain, peas, potatoes, French beans, tomatoes, cauliflowers, vegetable marrow, and lettuces, and also fruit, such as apples, peaches, grapes, plantains, custard apples, melons, and sometimes pine-apples.  Servants on the whole are good.  Most of them come from Madras.  Wages are much higher on the gold fields than in Bangalore—­head butlers, 16 rupees; ayahs, 12 to 14 rupees; chokras, 10 to 11 rupees; cooks, 11 to 14 rupees; and gardeners, 10 to 16 rupees a month.  Many of them leave domestic service and take work in the mines, where they get higher wages very often.”

As the elevation of Kolar is about 2,700 feet above sea level, the climate is for many months of the year extremely agreeable, and it would, so far as my experience goes, be difficult to find a more exhilarating and more exquisitely-tempered atmosphere than that of Kolar in the month of January—­at least such was my conclusion when I stayed with my friends at the field last January.  Nor did I hear anyone there complain of the climate, which, from the appearance of my host (who looked as if he had never left England) and others on the mines, must be a very healthy one, and in proof of this I may mention that Mr. Plummer, whom I have previously quoted, told me that the European miners had as good health as miners have in England.  Cholera has on several occasions broken out amongst the coolies, but this was rather a proof of the want of attention paid to sanitation and water supply, as none I believe has occurred since an improved water supply has been introduced by all the companies now pumping it up from depths of 200 feet from the bottoms of abandoned shafts.  There was a remarkable confirmation of the connection between cholera and water supply and sanitation one year, and the first company which paid attention to these points had no cholera amongst its people, while most of the other mines had more or less of the disease.  I may mention here a fact to which I have alluded in my chapter on coffee planting in Mysore—­namely, that Europeans in Mysore have been so little liable to cholera that in sixty years there has only been one death from it amongst the European officials of the province, and one doubtful case amongst the planters.

As regards mining and the extraction of gold, there is little to be said.  I inspected the works and the rock drills.  These work through the agency of compressed air, and at a cost of 15 rupees a day for coal for each drill, the same tool which is used in drilling by hand.  It is doubtful whether hand-drilling is not cheaper, but the latter is far slower, and hence does not pay as well, rapid progress being absolutely essential.  When working with rock drills, a shaft