ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 199 



wooden bucket of cream. Such cream ! a perfect blanket 

 of it, solid and quite delicious. The buffaloes being fed on 

 cotton-seed, their milk and the cream is white, not creamy, 

 in colour. We mightily enjoyed our feast, dipping the little 

 flat, round cakes of bread into the cream (and wishing we 

 might take away such another bucketful with us), a crowd 

 of our hosts and hostesses staring hard at us the while. 

 Our feelings on nearing the bottom of the bucket can be 

 more easily imagined than described, for there a horrifying 

 sight was disclosed to us. In as thick a layer as the much- 

 relished cream itself we now came upon the submerged 

 bodies of beetles, flies, spiders, bees, cockroaches, and 

 what not. These, too, had all found the cream much to 

 their taste, fell in, and were left there — for us to find ! 

 F. felt rather ill ; I got over the shock better ; and, to our 

 credit be it said, we both behaved so well under the ordeal 

 that no one else noticed our disgust. 



Accustomed as we were to the slight frames of the usual 

 run of natives, it was a pleasure to contemplate such a 

 different order of beings as the Todas. Every man we saw 

 was big and broad-shouldered. The features of these people 

 are straight and heavily moulded, the complexion olive, 

 though no darker than that of many a weather-beaten 

 Englishman, and every head shaggy with a perfect thatch 

 of coarse hair. The women are not tall, but they, too, are 

 upright in their carriage. They wear their blue-black hair 

 parted exactly even, and hanging down upon their cheeks 

 in quite lovely curls, in many cases reaching to their waists. 

 This gives them a Victorian-era air oddly out of place as 

 surmounting their figures ; the curls, too, are produced in 

 the ordinary way used in our nurseries, being done up in 

 rags overnight. Considering that these women know 

 nothing of us and our customs, that small fact struck me 

 as rather remarkable, for I had never seen it done among 

 other natives. Some of them still wore their curl-rags, 



