4 SPORT IN BENGAL. 



the tributary mehals ; a country of many rivers, shallow in 

 the dry season, but both broad and deep in the monsoon 

 months, when they are not always an unmixed blessing, 

 threatening, as they often do, to sweep into the ocean the 

 hopes of the husbandman, whose fields they irrigate and make 

 fruitful in their milder moods. 



Thus, then, it will be understood that in the Lower Pro- 

 vinces, ruled by the Proconsul of Belvedere for H.M. the 

 Queen-Empress, there are mountains, hills and highlands, as 

 well as flat grain-producing plains, green savannahs, and 

 extensive morasses ; fussy streamlets leaping and dancing 

 over boulders and pebbly beds, as well as broad rivers 

 sweeping majestically to the sea, to cast into it the spoils torn 

 from mountain sides more than a thousand miles away ; and 

 thus the soil, on which grew the deodar and the pine in the pure 

 mountain air, forms islets nourishing rushes and tamarisk in 

 the heat and reek amid the brackish waters of the mouths of 

 the Ganges and Megna. 



It is most interesting to watch the birth and growth of 

 such islets, where the great rivers pour their muddy waters into 

 the bay. First may be observed the low bank, half sand, half 

 mud, which, barely topping high water mark, offers a soft couch 

 to the basking crocodile, and a hunting-field to the curlew 

 and sandpiper ; next the rush-clothed islet submerged only at 

 the highest spring tides, the mid-day resort of the bar-headed 

 goose and the tern; then the island, a few inches higher, 

 tricked out with grass and tamarisk, giving shelter to the wild 

 buffalo, wild hog, and hog-deer. A year passes, and patches 

 of cultivation appear, and the fruits of the husbandman's 

 toil is halved with him by the wild beasts, on whom, again, 

 the sportsman takes toll with spear and rifle ; another year or 

 two may pass, and the entire surface is yellow with ripe grain, 

 rejoicing the heart of the sower, who now reaps, with little 

 toil and solicitude, fat harvests, unshared with savage creatures ; 

 and then " all/' as Mrs. Nickleby's neighbour remarked, " is 

 gas and gaiters " for a time ; for a wrecked boat, a snag or an 

 eddy may change the course of the mighty stream which gave 



