254 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XII. 



Nortliern India so as to 1)0 avuilable during the Lot weather and rains. 

 1 have no personal knowledge of such Tealeries, and as Hume's account 

 of what they should be is abont as full and good a one a? it is possible 

 to have, I must again indent on that much-quoted author. He says : 

 " Fresh water, and plenty of it, is the first requisite, and to ensure 

 this, the tealery should always be located near the well, and every drop 

 of water drawn thence for irrigaiing the garden made to pass through 

 it. The site should be, if possible, under some large umbrageous 

 trees, such as we so commonly find near garden wells, and to the east 

 of the trunk, so that the building may be completely protected from 

 the noontide and afternoon sun. You first make a shallow masonry 

 tank, — twelve feet by eight and ten inches in depth is amply 

 large. Four feet distant from this all round you build a thick mud 

 wall to a height of three feet from the interior. The whole interior 

 surface of this wall and the flat space between it and the tank must be 

 lined with pukka masonry, and finished oflF with well worked chunani. 

 The great points to bo aimed at are to have the whole lower parts so 

 finished off as to be on the one hand impregnable to rats, ichneumans 

 and snakes ; on the other to present no crevice in which dirt, ticks and 

 other insects can lurk. Outside the walls must be quite smooth so 

 that no snakes can crawl up them. On the wall you build stout 

 square pillars, four feet high, on which you place a thick pent thatch 

 roof. At the spring of the roof you stretch inside a thin, rather loose, 

 ceiling-cloth to prevent the birds hurting their heads when tbey start 

 up suddenly, as they will, at first, on any alarm, and especially when 

 the sweeper goes in to wash out the place. The inters[iace3 between 

 the pillars you fill in with well-made cross- work ijaffri') of split 

 bamboo, except one of them in which you place a door of similar work 

 made with slips of wood. You must arrange that all the water both 

 enters and leaves the building through gratings im[)orvious to snakes 

 and like marauders. Two or three feet outside the walls run 

 a little groove, a ditchlet, in which plant early in the year mulberry 

 cuttings, vvhi(;h will form a good hedge round the place, and 

 keej) the sun and hot winds off the building ; but this 

 must be kept neatly trimmed inside, or it would interfere with 

 veiitik.tion, and must not bo allowed to get higher than the 

 cftves. 



