These instances of infringement of caste rules will show the reader the way in which they are sometimes abandoned; and I could mention other minor points where I have seen them occasionally abandoned.  But not only are these rules thus, on urgent occasions, summarily set aside, but within a very short distance I have observed an alteration of custom.  For instance, on our side of the river which separates our county from the next, neither the farmers nor the toddy-drawers will eat of an animal that has even been touched after death by a Pariah; whereas, on the other side of the river, the Pariahs who came out shooting not only touched, but carried a couple of wild boars we had killed.  And yet the people on one side of the river are exactly of the same caste as those on the other.  But the fact seems to be, that many of the minor points of what is called caste law have arisen from some accident, and in the course of time have hardened into local customs.

And here, before bringing this chapter to a close, I find it impossible to refrain from again alluding to the numerous instances where caste has been made the common scapegoat of every Indian difficulty.  What is the meaning of this?  What is the meaning of that?  Why won’t the natives do this, and why won’t they do that?  Caste—­and caste is the common refuge; and with most of our countrymen who have tried to introduce new customs or a new religion, caste has ever been a handy and convenient peg on which to hang any difficulties they may meet with, or any problem they cannot readily solve.  In short, it is hard to say what difficulty has not been disposed of in this fashion.  Let us glance at two instances to illustrate my meaning.

For the first instance, I cannot select, perhaps, a better example than that afforded by the Rev. G. U. Pope, in the notes he has made when editing a second edition of the valuable work of the Abbe Dubois.  And, in alluding to these footnotes, it is impossible to repress some feeling of annoyance that the valuable work of the Abbe should, in an evil hour, have fallen into the hands of a writer who has thought fit often, in a few brief and contemptuous words, summarily to dismiss and overrule those conclusions which were the result of a life spent on more intimate terms with natives than any I have ever been able to hear of.  And Mr. Pope’s statements are the more calculated to impose on the general reader, as he speaks of having had “more than twenty years of a somewhat intimate intercourse with the Hindoos;” the fact being that he spent the greater part (in fact, all but a few years, as far as I have been able to ascertain) as head of the Grammar School on the Nilgiri Hills, where he had no more opportunity of having any intercourse with natives than a Hindoo would have of gaining experience of the natives of England, were he to take up his residence on the Grampians, and interchange a few words occasionally with the shepherds of those mountains.  But as to what caste