320 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



been oilmen. The party wall between them was of mud, only G or 7 

 feet high, and crnmbling at the top, so that the houses were open to 

 each other across the whole pitch of the begrimed roof. Plague 

 deaths had occurred in both, and in one of them five had died out of 

 a family of six. There were several other padlocked doors on the 

 opposite side of the street and at intervals in the rows of houses else- 

 where. Most of the houses, I was told, had been visited in one or 

 other of the five epidemics, those which escaped in one season being 

 invaded in another, whilst some houses had had the infection in them 

 time after time. 



While the infection had crept about to all parts of this village site, 

 it was the unanimous opinion that it always began in a certain quar- 

 ter, the high ground on the northern side, next to the higli road, 

 which was the jjarticular (jiiarter of the Mohammedan butchers and 

 cattle dealers. The Lingayat cultivators had a bitter grievance 

 against their Mussulman neighbors, which they tried to interest me 

 in, having mistaken me for a person of authority. vSlaughtering of 

 cattle, sheep,, and goats, curing of meat for the Bombay market, 

 dressing of hides, and the like, were the chief in(histries of that 

 quarter of the village. There was no regular slaughterhouse, but 

 each householder used his house or the space before or behind it 

 for killing in, the flayed carcases and skins being in evidence as one 

 walked past ; and of course the whole soil of this elevated corner of 

 the village was saturated with the l)lood and offal of many years and 

 swarmed with rats, as shambles always do. A year or two before, the 

 sanitary inspector from Belgaum, a native official of the third rank, 

 had made a report upon the nuisance, recommending that the ]Moham- 

 medans should be removed to a new site outside the village, which 

 could have been found for them with the greatest ease not far off; 

 but the commissioner had not moved in the matter, and the anger of 

 the Lingayat farmers was unappeased. 



A DHARWAR VILLAGE. 



I shall take next a somewhat different sample of these villages, 

 which also has had five epidemics of plague in the last seven years, 

 but not so severe, and curiously enough always three or four months 

 Liter in the season, as this table shows : 



