PITS AND PEGS. 83 



of this description that it is scarcely worth while making a 

 difference in the lining in so small a space." 



The next task calls for less personal exertion, 

 but demands a good deal of supervision. The 

 planter starts out each morning at daybreak, with 

 perhaps two hundred men following in Indian file 

 at his heels, and proceeds to the jungles already 

 pegged and marked out. Each coolie takes with 

 him a mammoty, an axe for cutting roots, and a 

 long iron bar pointed at one end and flattened out 

 into a spud at the other, chiefly used for removing 

 heavy stones and loosening the soil. All then go 

 to work in a long straight line if possible, but to get 

 the hands into any sort of order in heavy jungle 

 is much more easy to talk of than to effect, as it is 

 not possible to see ten men at a time, and each 

 man wants to work where the ground is softest and 

 there are fewest roots. The daily task of each is 

 forty or fifty pits of regulation size, and the super- 

 intendent has to see this properly done. Perhaps 

 he places a mark where each man begins, at the 

 last pit of yesterday's work, and then goes to 

 the other end of the line, half-a-mile away. When 

 he returns, he is surprised and pleased to find the 

 first men have already finished half their tasks, 

 but on investigating he sees the " mild Hindoos" 

 have moved his pegs back so as to include ten or 

 twelve of yesterday's pits, and this naturally makes 

 him wrathful. Besides the coolies who thus scamp 

 their allotted task, or are too sick and weak to 



