382 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



inhabitants being in camp near their fields about a quarter of a mile 

 away. They had taken alarm from the number of dead rats found, 

 and the deaths of ?>G persons in October, November, and December, 

 and from the recollection of their first plague epidemic two years 

 l»efore, when 171 died in the village. At Bijapur City I was told by 

 a high native official that, if the infection became active another year, 

 the temporary camp round the railway station would become a ])er- 

 manent residential suburb, so that the area within the walls would be 

 deserted for the second time in its history. This evacuation is at the 

 people's own initiative and at their own expense, which many of them 

 can ill afford. The same thing was going on at Belgaum, where 

 several thousands went out to camp in the evening and returned to 

 their work in the bazaars and offices in the morning. 



At Dharwar a small beginning had been made toward permanent 

 evacuation. The government had given a piece of vacant ground to 

 the municipality, wdiich had sold it by auction in lots at a very low 

 price, and a new street of some forty houses, called Gibb street, after 

 the collector, had been run up. At Poona 7,000 or more were in camp 

 along the sides of suburban roads, or on the various maidans of the 

 city. At Bombay there were three large health cam])s along the sea- 

 ward side of the island as far north as Mahim. In a group of vil- 

 lages of the Baroda State near Naosari, the cultivators had built 

 lofty and commodious huts near their wells and fields, to which they 

 had removed their bedsteads, chests, and other furniture, and in 

 Avhich they and their children and their bullocks were not unhappy. 

 The Aveather after the rains is so fine throughout the Bombay Presi- 

 dency that there is no hardship whatever in camping out. 



It is otherwise in the earlier part of the plague season of the north- 

 west, of which I shall give a single instance from the Punjab. I 

 went one day with the medical officer on plague duty to a group of 

 villages 12 or 14 miles from JuUundur. At one of these, a small 

 village of some 200 people, there had been many deaths from plague 

 two years before, and on the day of our visit there were more per- 

 sons lying sick or recovering in their houses than I had seen any- 

 where in so small a space except in the hospital at Boml)ny. After 

 we had gone round the village, a palaver was held with about a dozen 

 of the men and youths, who stood in a semicircle near the village 

 well, the women drawing the water all the while. Their spokesman 

 was a sturdy little Jat who knew his mind, spoke to the jioint, and 

 bore himself with the aplomb of a man of affairs. They had been 

 asked in advance to consider whether they would not submit to inocu- 

 lation, and had decided so peremptorily in the negative that the 

 matter w^as not so much as mentioned again. The only question 

 discussed was evacuation. The spokesman pointed out various prac- 

 tical difficulties in the way of a general camping out, to which Cap- 



