t first took root and, quickly adapting
itself to a strange environment, developed into a new and vigorous
species, spread like the thistle and became a national institution. At
first it was only the Briton's way of mouthing a common native word,
"tadi" (pronounced ta-dee), which meant palm juice; but it became
current in its present shape as early as 1673, when the traveller Fryer
wrote of "the natives singing and roaring all night long, being drunk
with toddy, the wine of the cocoe." About a century later Burns sang,

The lads and lasses, blythely bent,
To mind baith saul and body,
Sit round the table, weel content,
And steer about the toddy.

Between these I can find no vestigia, but imagination easily fills the
gap. I see a company of jovial Scots, met in Calcutta, or Surat, on St.
Andrew's Day. European wines and beer are expensive, whisky not
obtainable at all; but the skilful khansamah makes up a punch with toddy
spirit, hot water, sugar and limes, and they are "well content." After
many years I see the few of them who still survive foregathered again in
the old country, and one proposes to have a good brew of toddy for auld
lang syne. If real toddy spirit cannot be had, what of that? Whisky is
found to take very kindly to hot water and sugar and limes, and the old
folks at home and the neighbours and the minister himself pronounce a
most favourable verdict on "toddy." In short, it has come to stay. But
we must return to the liquor in the Bhundaree's gourd. It is the rich
sap which should have gone to the forming of coconuts, which is
intercepted by cutting off the point of the fruit stalk and tying on an
earthen pot. If the pot is clean, the juice, when it is taken down in
the morning, not fermented yet but just beginning to sparkle with minute
bubbles, not too sweet and not so oily as the milk of the coconut, is
nectar to a hot and thirsty soul. No summer drink have I drunk so
innocently restorative after a hot and toilsome march on a broiling May
morning. But the Bhundaree will not squander it so: he takes care not to
clean his pots, and when he takes them down in the morning the liquor is
already foaming like London stout. Not that he means to drink it
himself, for you must know that, by the rules of his caste, he is a
total abstainer, being a Bhundaree, whose function is to draw toddy, not
to drink it. This is one of those profound institutes by which the
wisdom of the ancients fenced the whole soc