Britain's achievements on
India's behalf has been her system of metalled roads, defying alike the
dust of the dry season and the floods of the monsoon.

One such road I have in mind, a road leading from the old fortress town
of Vellore through twenty-three miles of fertile plain, to Gudiyattam,
at the foot of the Eastern Ghats. It is just a South Indian "up country"
road, skirting miles of irrigated rice fields, gold-green in their
beginnings, gold-brown in the days of ripening and reaping. It winds
past patches of sugar cane and cocoanut palm; then half arid uplands,
where goats and lean cattle search for grass blades that their
predecessors have overlooked; then the _bizarre_ shapes of the ghats,
wide spaces open to the play of sun and wind and rain, of passing shadow
and sunset glory. They are among the breathing spaces of earth, which no
man hath tamed or can tame.

An Indian "Flivver."

An ordinary road it is, and passing over it the ordinary
procession--heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bullocks; crowded
jutkas whose tough, little ponies disappear in a rattle of wheels and a
cloud of dust; weddings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or
mournful as the case may be. One feature alone distinguishes this road
from others of its kind; once a week its dusty length is traversed by a
visitant from the West, a "Tin Lizzie," whose unoccupied spaces are
piled high with medicine chests and instrument cases. Once a week the
Doctor passes by, and the countryside turns out to meet her.

When the Doctor Passes by.

Where do they come from, the pathetic groups that continually bring the
little Ford to a halt? For long stretches the road passes through
apparently uninhabited country, yet here they are, the lame, the halt,
and the blind, as though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of
its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the tamarind trees, stands
one village; at the edge of the rice fields huddles another. The roofs
of thatch or earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the
landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of child-birth pain,
its fever-burnings, its germ-borne epidemics where sanitation is
unknown, its final pangs of dissolution. But once a week the Doctor
passes by.

What do she and her attendants treat? Sore eyes and scabies and all the
dirt-carried minor ailments that infect the village; malaria from the
mosquitoes that swarm among the rice fields; aching