324 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



really stood. I found from the printed figures of 1904 that the dis- 

 trict of Jhang, which included fully three- fourths of the Chenab 

 colony (now the Lyallpur district) had had 4,000 deaths from plague, 

 nearly all in April and May, 1904, which was only a tithe of the rate 

 of ojther Punjal) districts equally populous, and that the southern tah- 

 sil of (lujranwala, which included the rest of the new Chenab villages, 

 had had far less plague than the three other tahsils, where the villages 

 were old. Still, there had been plague in the new villages, one 

 of those which I visited having had 30 deaths in the month of 

 December, 1903, with a prospect of more if the villagers had not 

 cleared out into the jungle, and another near it, but built two 

 years earlier, l)efore the regulation plan was adopted, having had 60 

 deaths. There are more than 1,000 such new villages in the Chenab 

 colony, which have been built within the last twelve or thirteen years. 

 The colonists are in great part retired sepoys of the Sikh regiments, 

 with their subadars, or native officers, as the lumbardars of villages. 

 Sepoys received grants of 18 acres, some officers a square of 28 acres, 

 others two such squares, paying a small land tax, as well as so much 

 j)er acre for the use of the canal water for irrigating their fields. The 

 land is now nearly all taken up, and is producing heavy crops of 

 Avheat, cotton, and sugar, the export of wheat from this district being 

 one of the largest from India, as the railway traffic showed. 



The regulation village which I visited, about 6 miles across country 

 from the railway, was a great improvement in some respects upon the 

 ordinary hugger-mugger of an old Punjabi village. Tt was laid out 

 in regular squares with wide roads between. The compounds were 

 roomy, with the dwelling houses kept apart from the cattle sheds. A 

 certain elevation had been prescribed for all dwelling houses, perhaps 

 10 feet or more, just as our own local boards have raised the height of 

 all new country cottages. But the public works department had left 

 the colonists a free hand in the matter of building materials, and they 

 had built their villages of sheer mud. In the village I am referring 

 to there was not a single kiln-burnt brick, except in the facing of the 

 village well, and, so far as I could see, there were not even sun-dried 

 bricks in the Avails of houses. The Avhole A'illage Avas a hasty pudding 

 of crude mud walls, some of which Avere already cracked. '\^lien I 

 asked to see some house in which there had been plague, I Avas shoAvn 

 a closed door a fcAv feet behind the chair of state in which I was seated 

 at the crossroads of the Adllage. It Avas a small corner house or shop, 

 apparently a single room without a AvindoAv, in Avhich tAvo cooks had 

 died of plague. The mud Avail Avas cracked in places and had one or 

 tAvo round holes in it Avhich looked suspiciously like rat holes. All 

 the new villages of the colony are built of mud, except those few 

 Avhich have the good fortune to be stations on the raihvay. 



