to the
regulation club, are unknown. The open-handed system of giving away
villages had raised a large and unmannerly crop of _jaghirdars_. These
have been taken up and brought in hand by Sir Pertab Singh, to the
better order of the State.

A Punjabi Sirdar, Har Dyal Singh, has reformed, or made rather, Courts
on the Civil and Criminal Side; and his hand is said to be found in a
good many sweepings out of old corners. It must always be borne in mind
that everything that has been done, was carried through over and under
unlimited intrigue, for Jodhpur is a Native State. Intrigue must be met
with intrigue by all except Gordons or demi-gods; and it is curious to
hear how a reduction in tariff, or a smoothing out of some tangled
Court, had to be worked by shift and byway. The tales are comic, but not
for publication. Howbeit, Har Dyal Singh got his training in part under
the Punjab Government, and in part in a little Native State far away in
the Himalayas, where intrigue is not altogether unknown. To the credit
of the "Pauper Province" be it said, it is not easy to circumvent a
Punjabi. The details of his work would be dry reading. The result of it
is good, and there is justice in Marwar, and order and firmness in its
administration.

Naturally, the land-revenue is the most interesting thing in Marwar from
an administrative point of view. The basis of it is a tank about the
size of a swimming-bath, with a catchment of several hundred square
yards, draining through leeped channels. When God sends the rain, the
people of the village drink from the tank. When the rains fail, as they
failed this year, they take to their wells, which are brackish and breed
guinea-worm. For these reasons the revenue, like the Republic of San
Domingo, is never alike for two years running. There are no canal
questions to harry the authorities; but the fluctuations are enormous.
Under the Aravalis the soil is good: further north they grow millet and
pasture cattle, though, said a Revenue Officer cheerfully, "God knows
what the brutes find to eat." _Apropos_ of irrigation, the one canal
deserves special mention, as showing how George Stephenson came to
Jodhpur and astonished the inhabitants. Six miles from the city proper
lies the Balsaman Sagar, a great tank. In the hot weather, when the city
tanks ran out or stank, it was the pleasant duty of the women to tramp
twelve miles at the end of the day's work to fill their lotahs. In the
hot weather Jo