68 ANIMALS OF NO IMPORTANCE. 



The pariah dogs would in all probability win the cham- 

 pionship for disturbing sleep, but for the fact that they are 

 sorely handicapped by the distance which usually inter- 

 venes between the site of the European quarters and that 

 of the native city. I have often lain awake at night and 

 listened to the distant barking of the dogs ; never have two 

 consecutive minutes and rarely as much as ten seconds 

 passed without a dog either barking, yelping, or howling. 

 The pariah dogs give vent to successive waves of sound. 

 First there is awful discord made up of barking, yapping, 

 yelling, howling, and yelping ; this gradually diminishes, 

 until the barking of only one dog is heard ; then even he 

 ceases for two seconds. Next another bark is heard which 

 seems to arouse half the dogs in the city, for the babel 

 again commences and lasts for fully five minutes before 

 the volume of sound again diminishes. Thus the night 

 noise of the pariah dogs is an undulation of which the 

 ascending limb is short and sharp, while the descending 

 one is long and drawn out. 



Perhaps the organism which most deserves the prize for 

 making the night hideous is the Indian cultivator. He is, 

 I am aware, a hard-worked man, and I like him ; but I do 

 not admire his methods ; to me they seem crude and primi- 

 tive. Could he not have found some device for keeping 

 wild boars out of his sugar-cane field, other than that of 

 shouting with might and main the livelong night? Surely 

 he deserves the prize ; it is, I trow, no mean feat to toil all 

 day and shout all night ! 



But stay, I have forgotten the peacock. According to 

 the Italians this bird " hath the plumage of an angel, the 

 voice of a devil and the belly of a thief/' For the truth of 

 the two first assertions I can vouch ; of the third I am only 

 able to say that no peacock has ever stolen anything of 

 mine except sleep, which is not a subject of larceny. In 

 order to hear the peacock at his best, it is necessary to sleep 

 in a bagh surrounded by temples, tanks, fakirs, et hoc 

 genus omne. While listening to the efforts of the gorgeous 



