r; he buys weeds at a
nominal price and sells them very dear. Finally, he is always a shocking
coward: eighty-four Khatris will run away from four thieves.

Nor does the clerical caste fare better at the hands of the popular
epigrammatist. Where three Kayasths are gathered together a
thunderbolt is sure to fall; when honest men fall out the Kayasth
gets his chance. When a Kayasth takes to money-lending he is a
merciless creditor. He is a man of figures; he lives by the point of his
pen; in his house even the cat learns two letters and a half. He is a
versatile creature, and where there are no tigers he will become a
shikari; but he is no more to be trusted than a crow or a snake
without a tail. One of the failings sometimes imputed to the educated
Indian is attacked in the saying, "Drinking comes to a Kayasth with
his mother's milk."

Considering the enormous strength of the agricultural population of
India, one would have expected to find more proverbs directed against
the great cultivating castes. Possibly the reason may be that they made
most of the proverbs, and people can hardly be expected to sharpen their
wit on their own shortcomings. In two provinces, however, the rural
Pasquin has let out very freely at the morals and manners of the Jat,
the typical peasant of the eastern Punjab and the western districts of
the United Provinces. You may as well, we are told, look for good in a
Jat as for weevils in a stone. He is your friend only so long as you
have a stick in your hand. If he cannot harm you he will leave a bad
smell as he goes by. To be civil to him is like giving treacle to a
donkey. If he runs amuck it takes God to hold him. A Jat's laugh
would break an ordinary man's ribs. When he learns manners, he blows his
nose with a mat, and there is a great run on the garlic. His baby has a
plowtail for a plaything. The Jat stood on his own corn heap and
called out to the King's elephant-drivers, "Hi there, what will you take
for those little donkeys?" He is credited with practicing fraternal
polyandry, like the Venetian nobility of the early eighteenth century,
as a measure of domestic economy, and a whole family are said to have
one wife between them.

The Doms, among whom we find scavengers, vermin-eaters, executioners,
basket-makers, musicians, and professional burglars, probably represent
the remnants of a Dravidian tribe crushed out of recognition by the
invading Aryans and condemned to menial and degrading