422 BEDQUILTS 



is a simple one — a snaffle or a double ring, sometimes a 

 chain bit, but always of European manufacture. One 

 rarely sees a gag, and yet more rarely a native-made bit. 

 Northern India might well be dubbed the land of bed- 

 quilts. What old house-keepers still call "comforters" 

 are, in cold weather, never out of your sight. Every na- 

 tive, unless he is poor, has one to sleep in — a red, yellow, 

 green, or Cashmere pattern, cotton- padded, quilted spread 

 — and this serves as his burnoose, bar grace, whenever he 

 sallies forth. If he be well-to-do, he has him a long coat 

 made of the same stuff, and when he parades up and down 

 on a chilly day, he makes you think of a perambulating 

 feather-bed, all made up. In Bengal there are not so 

 many bedquilts. .You see a population apparently better 

 off, and many men wear Cashmere shawls in every stage 

 of decadence. In lower Bengal the people look well fed. 

 You no longer see the canary-bird leg and spare frame ; 

 the coolies are fairly rounded up and muscular ; and the 

 same remark applies to the Madras Presidency. 



