rupee. However, you soon come to know the coolies by sight, and after
some experience are rarely 'taken in,' but many young beginners get
'done' most thoroughly till they become accustomed to the tricks of the
artless and unsophisticated coolie.

The type of feature along a line of coolies is as a rule a very
forbidding and degraded one. They are mostly of the very poorest class.
Many of them are plainly half silly, or wholly idiotic; not a few are
deaf and dumb; others are crippled or deformed, and numbers are leprous
and scrofulous. Numbers of them are afflicted in some districts with
goitre, caused probably by bad drinking water; all have a pinched,
withered, wan look, that tells of hard work and insufficient fare. It
is a pleasure to turn to the end of the line, where the Dangur women
and boys and girls generally take their place. Here are the loudest
laughter, and the sauciest faces. The children are merry, chubby, fat
things, with well-distended stomachs and pleasant looks; a merry smile
rippling over their broad fat cheeks as they slyly glance up at you.
The women--with huge earrings in their ears, and a perfect load of
heavy brass rings on their arms--chatter away, make believe to be shy,
and show off a thousand coquettish airs. Their very toes are bedizened
with brass rings; and long festoons of red, white, and blue beads hang
pendent round their necks.

In the evening the line is re-formed before the bungalow. A huge bag of
copper coin is produced. The old Lallah, or writer, with spectacles on
nose, squats down in the middle of the assembled coolies, and as each
name is called, the mates count out the pice, and make it over to the
coolie, who forthwith hurries off to get his little purchases made at
the village Bunneah's shop; and so, on a poor supper of parched peas,
or boiled rice, with no other relish but a pinch of salt, the poor
coolie crawls to bed, only to dream of more hard work and scanty fare
on the morrow. Poor thing! a village coolie has a hard time of it!
During the hot months, if rice be cheap and plentiful, he can jog along
pretty comfortably, but when the cold nights come on, and he cowers in
his wretched hut, hungry, half naked, cold, and wearied, he is of all
objects most pitiable. It is, however, a fact little creditable to his
more prosperous fellow-countrymen, that he gets better paid for his
labour in connection with factory work, than he does in many cases for
tasks forced on him by the