VALLEY OF THE SOANE. 135 
bugles and beads. Now here, as at home, I remarked that the vendors 
of these superfluities occupy the approaches to this Vanity-Fair: no 
doubt at the instigation of the insinuating branches of the families of 
buyers, who thus secure their partners’ or parents’ visit to this depart- 
ment, when his purse is yet full. As, throughout the East, the trades 
are congregated into particular quarters of the cities, so did the itine- 
rants here group themselves into little bazaars for each class of com- 
modity. Whilst I was engaged in purchasing a few drugs and trifling 
articles of native workmanship, the elephant made an attack on a lolly- 
pop stall, and demolished a magnificent erection of barley-sugar, that 
would have done credit to Gunter's shop or almost to a noia: s 
dessert-table. 
Mr. Felle's house occupies a hill on the plain, and is, in fact, built 
upon the site of an old fort, still surrounded on three sides by a moat. 
A neat garden adorned with Mignonnette, Sweet-Peas, and Roses, was 
a pleasant sight in the wilderness, though not so attractive to me as 
the water-plants which filled the moat. In this, which is half supplied 
by spring-water, grew the Nymphaea Lotus, Damasonium Indicum, three 
species of Potamogeton (oneis P. natans?), Aponogeton, Villarsia cristata, 
(the flowers small and not crested), Chara, Zannichellia, and two species 
of Naias. These three tufted aquatic genera are used indifferently or 
together, in the refinement of sugar by the natives. In a large 
tank hard by, and wholly supplied with rain-water, I observed only the 
crested Villarsia, no Aponogeton, Nymphaea, or Damasonium, and so with 
other rain-water tanks, which, though well peopled with plants, con- 
tained none of the above four. This is probably owing, either to some 
property in the water, or to these plants disliking the greater changes 
of level in the pluviometers. 
The country all around is a dead flat, several feet under water during 
the rains. The only rise I saw was south, in the direction of the Ghauts ; 
and thither I posted towards a natural tank, situated in the low hills. 
For the first five miles the paths are through rice-fields, and a country 
similar to that passed over yesterday ; but, on nearing the Ghauts, the 
flat beds of sandstone rise to the surface, and immediately a low forest 
jungle commences, consisting of all the trees of the Soane and plains of 
Behar, a convincing proof of the mechanical, and not, the chemical pro- 
perties of the soil influencing their distribution. As I passed from the 
