ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 171 



us only on taking to himself a wife, and so being unable to 

 follow our fortunes when we were transferred to another 

 district. Sorry enough to bid Pintu ' good-bye,' we did not 

 lose sight of him, but kept a guardian eye on him and his 

 thereafter. 



Most Europeans prefer having out-and-out natives to 

 deal with rather than half-castes, who are generally Portu- 

 guese half-breeds. The women are sometimes very lovely 

 after a mulatto fashion, and so fair that the dark blood is 

 hardly discernible, though their children, again, might be 

 almost like pure natives. With but few exceptions, they are 

 Roman Catholics. They speak English in a way of their 

 own (commonly called ' chee-chee '), or French if they belong 

 to any of the French settlements — Pondicherry, Chander- 

 nagore, etc. 



Notwithstanding its bad reputation in parts for malarial 

 fever, also for other complaints and discomforts of sorts 

 peculiar to itself, people who know both coasts prefer living 

 on the west. For one thing, it is so beautiful I — always 

 green, the shore being fringed with cocoanut palms, some 

 of them actually growing right out into the sea. Another 

 point which contributes to the pleasing effect of the scenery 

 is the terra-cotta colour of the people's dwellings. They are 

 built of laterite, a rather soft and easily worked stone, 

 which, being quarried in the country, is the building material 

 almost universally used among the natives in this part of 

 India. Most picturesque do these homes look, set in the 

 green foliage of the gardens, every house having its own 

 cultivated plot of plantain trees and palms. Conspicuous 

 among the latter is the gigantic talipot, 1 not gigantic as to 

 height — for the stem is very short and thick — but the tough, 

 substantial leaves are so enormous that a few suffice for the 

 thatching of a house of medium size. Narrow verandahs 

 surround each house, and if the windows are barred it is 



1 Indian name for Corypha umbraculiferae. 



