322 • PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



appears from the subsequent printed returns that 14 died of plague in 

 December and 18 in January, while a continuance until March was 

 probable, according to precedent. 



PnAGITE VinLAGES OF THE NORTHWEST. 



Time will not allow me to describe in detail other j^lague villages, 

 and I regret especially that I must pass over the much better type of 

 village in Gujarat, in which the houses are mostly built of brick (but 

 sometimes repaired with mud), raised on plinths, commodious, and 

 not without traces of taste. Leaving the Bombay Presidency, and 

 coming next to the northwest, which is now by far the worst seat 

 of plague, the many thousands of villages which have had the infec- 

 tion in them are of a very uniform type. As one goes westward, 

 the couipact fort-like aggregate of uiud walls and flat roofs becomes 

 more distinctive, and throughout the whole of the Punjab that is the 

 type. We have left behind the more open and irregular formation of 

 the small Bengali village, with clumps of trees or bushes between 

 the several homesteads, patches of kitchen garden among the trees, 

 and creepers overrunning the verandas. High-pitched tiled roofs 

 succeed, and after these thatched roofs with broad drooping eaves, 

 until at length we come west of Allahabad to the naked mud walls 

 and flat roofs of the nortliAvest, without a single amenity that the 

 eye can rest on, and in many cases without even a tree beside the 

 village well. The interior of these villages is not unlike that which 

 I have already described for districts of the south, but the houses are 

 often huddled together, with narrow, winding lanes between the rows, 

 and sometimes in compact blocks, back to back and side to side, with 

 no intervals at all. I shall take an extreme instance from a large and 

 W'ealthy village of Jullunclur. Jullundur is one of the most fortu- 

 nately situated districts of the Punjab, and its villagers ai*. proverbi- 

 ally w^ell satisfied with their lot in life. They have a soil renowned 

 for its fertility, and they have water so easily reached by w-ells wher- 

 ever they may sink them, that they can dispense with irrigation 

 canals, and need not pay 2 or 3 rupees an acre for watering their 

 crops. If they are poor, it is because the pressure of population is 

 great, being, indeed, about 000 to the square mile, and the highest 

 in the Punjab; but the signs of poverty, or at all events of distress, 

 are not at all oljvious to the passer-by, and the people are of good 

 physique. The district w^as the first in the Punjab to be infected 

 with plague, and in the last four years it has lost 100,000 by that 

 cause ; at the time of my visit, those who were dying were said to be 

 robust men and women in the flower of their age. 



