ld be no
doubt of the truth of the conclusion to which the people had at
length come. 'There are', he said, 'some countries in which
punishments follow crimes after long intervals, and, indeed, do not
take place till some future birth; in others, they follow crimes
immediately; and such is the country bordering the stream of _Mother
Nerbudda_. This', said he, 'is a stream more holy than that of the
great Ganges herself, since no man is supposed to derive any benefit
from that stream unless he either bathe in it or drink from it; but
the sight of the Nerbudda from a distant hill could bless him, and
purify him. In other countries, the slaughter of cows and bullocks
might not be punished for ages; and the harvest, in such countries,
might continue good through many successive generations under such
enormities; indeed, he was not quite sure that there might not be
countries in which no punishment at all would inevitably follow; but,
so near the Nerbudda, this could not be the case.[l5] Providence
could never suffer beef to be eaten so near her sacred majesty
without visiting the crops with blight, hail, or some other calamity,
and the people with cholera morbus, small-pox, and other great
pestilences. As for himself, he should never be persuaded that all
these afflictions did not arise wholly and solely from this dreadful
habit of eating beef. I declare', concluded he, 'that if the
Government would but consent to prohibit the eating of beef, it might
levy from the lands three times the revenue that they now pay.'

The great festival of the Holi, the Saturnalia of India, terminates
on the last day of Phalgun, or 16th of March.[16] On that day the
Holi is burned; and on that day the ravages of the monster (for
monster they will have it to be) are supposed to cease. Any field
that has remained untouched up to that time is considered to be quite
secure from the moment the Holi has been committed to the flames.
What gave rise to the notion I have never been able to discover, but
such is the general belief. I suppose the siliceous epidermis must
then have become too hard, and the pores in the stem too much closed
up to admit of the further depredation of the fungi.

In the latter end of 1831, while I was at Sagar, a cowherd in driving
his cattle to water at a reach of the Bias river, called the
Nardhardhar, near the little village of Jasrathi, was reported to
have seen a vision that told him the waters of that reach, taken up