ur in the fields. God is ever with the
cultivator in all the manifold sights and sounds of this marvellous
world of His. In that mysterious temple of the Dawn, in which we of
noisy mess-rooms, heated courts, and dusty offices are infrequent
worshippers, the peasant is a priest. There he offers up his hopes and
fears for rain and sunshine; there he listens to the anthems of birds
we rarely hear, and interprets auguries that for us have little
meaning.

The beast of prey skulking back to his lair, the stag quenching his
thirst ere retiring to the depths of the forest, the wedge of wild
fowl flying with trumpet notes to some distant lake, the vulture
hastening in heavy flight to the carrion that night has provided, the
crane flapping to the shallows, and the jackal shuffling along to his
shelter in the nullah, have each and all their portent to the
initiated eye. Day, with its fierce glories, brings the throbbing
silence of intense life, and under flickering shade, amid the soft
pulsations of Nature, the cultivator lives his daydream. What there is
of squalor, and drudgery, and carking care in his life melts into a
brief oblivion, and he is a man in the presence of his God with the
holy stillness of Nature brooding over him. With lengthening shadows
comes labour and a re-awaking. The air is once more full of all sweet
sounds, from the fine whistle of the kite, sailing with supreme
dominion through the azure depths of air, to the stir and buzzing
chatter of little birds and crickets among the leaves and grass. The
egret has resumed his fishing in the tank where the rain is stored for
the poppy and sugarcane fields, the sand-pipers bustle along the
margin, or wheel in little silvery clouds over the bright waters, the
gloomy cormorant sits alert on the stump of a dead date-tree, the
little black divers hurry in and out of the weeds, and ever and anon
shoot under the water in hot quest of some tiny fish; the whole
machinery of life and death is in full play, and our villager shouts
to his patient oxen and lives his life. Then gradual darkness, and
food with homely joys, a little talk, a little tobacco, a few sad
songs, and kindly sleep.

The villages are of immemorial antiquity; their names, their
traditions, their hereditary offices have come down out of the dim
past through countless generations. History sweeps over them with her
trampling armies and her conquerors, her changing dynasties and her
shifting laws--sweeps ove