So let us melt and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love. 
A VALEDICTION.

It was punishing work, even though he travelled by night and camped by day; but within the limits of his vision there was no man whom Scott could call master.  He was as free as Jimmy Hawkins—­freer, in fact, for the Government held the Head of the Famine tied neatly to a telegraph-wire, and if Jimmy had ever regarded telegrams seriously, the death-rate of that famine would have been much higher than it was.

At the end of a few days’ crawling Scott learned something of the size of the India which he served; and it astonished him.  His carts, as you know, were loaded with wheat, millet, and barley, good food-grains needing only a little grinding.  But the people to whom he brought the life-giving stuffs were rice eaters.  They knew how to hull rice in their mortars, but they knew nothing of the heavy stone querns of the North, and less of the material that the white man convoyed so laboriously.  They clamoured for rice—­unhusked paddy, such as they were accustomed to—­and, when they found that there was none, broke away weeping from the sides of the cart.  What was the use of these strange hard grains that choked their throats?  They would die.  And then and there were many of them kept their word.  Others took their allowance, and bartered enough millet to feed a man through a week for a few handfuls of rotten rice saved by some less unfortunate.  A few put their shares into the rice-mortars, pounded it, and made a paste with foul water; but they were very few.  Scott understood dimly that many people in the India of the South ate rice, as a rule, but he had spent his service in a grain Province, had seldom seen rice in the blade or the ear, and least of all would have believed that, in time of deadly need, men would die at arm’s length of plenty, sooner than touch food they did not know.  In vain the interpreters interpreted; in vain his two policemen showed by vigorous pantomime what should be done.  The starving crept away to their bark and weeds, grubs, leaves, and clay, and left the open sacks untouched.  But sometimes the women laid their phantoms of children at Scott’s feet, looking back as they staggered away.

Faiz Ullah opined it was the will of God that these foreigners should die, and therefore it remained only to give orders to burn the dead.  None the less there was no reason why the Sahib should lack his comforts, and Faiz Ullah, a campaigner of experience, had picked up a few lean goats and had added them to the procession.  That they might give milk for the morning meal, he was feeding them on the good grain that these imbeciles rejected.  ‘Yes,’ said Faiz Ullah; ’if the Sahib thought fit, a little milk might be given to some of the babies’; but, as the Sahib well knew, babies were cheap, and, for his own part, Faiz Ullah held that there was no