ON THE COTTON PLAINS 



MY earliest recollections are of a yellow, grassy, 

 undulating, waste country, studded with low 

 thorn bushes, in the shade of one of which 

 lay my mother, as I nestled at her side. 

 The sun had just risen, and shone warmly on my callow 

 hide ; in the distance, on the confines of a vast plain, lay 

 a long, purple line of hills ; the ceaseless drone and buzz 

 of insects filled the air with a drowsy murmur ; a flock of 

 cranes passed high overhead, their harsh cries mellowed 

 by distance, as they winged their wedge-shaped flight 

 towards the cultivated country, where the green of the 

 rabi crops faded into the blue distance. A feeling of joy, 

 of exuberant youth, flowed through my young veins, as 

 I rose to my feet, and stretched my long , ungainly limbs 

 in the glad sunshine ; then, executing a blithe gambol and 

 sidelong jump, stood, pricking my ears at the song of a 

 villager driving his yoke of oxen to the plough. 



My mother lay with drooping ears, lazily flicking the 

 flies from her haunch, her full dark eyes ever and anon 

 roaming dreamily over the wide expanse of fallow before 

 her. Ah ! It was a good country that ! Rich fields, 

 good company, and few of the worries of life which fall 

 to the share of the buck whose lines Fate casts in 

 less remote pastures. Any antelope possessing a fairly 

 developed bump of caution should, in that district, grow 

 to green old age, and yet never hear the whistle of bullet 

 or crack of rifle. 



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