320 SPORT IN BENGAL. 



on hummocks artificially raised slightly above the highest 

 inundations ; but when the latter are of extraordinary height, 

 as will be the case once in every ten or a dozen years, the 

 unhappy people are forced to take refuge on platforms built 

 within their houses for storing grain and other things, or 

 even on the rOofs, till the waters subside a little in the course 

 of a few days. Sometimes, however, the poor little hovels 

 are themselves submerged or completely swept away by the 

 deluge, and their owners are compelled to take to canoes, of 

 which each family possesses one at least. Needless to say 

 that these people are the poorest of the poor, living at the 

 best of times a hand-to-mouth sort of existence, partly as 

 husbandmen, partly as fishers, always sunk in the lowest 

 depths of poverty and ignorance. Such being their condition, 

 it is not surprising that these people have an evil reputation, 

 and had, till the time of the formation of the present reformed 

 police, the credit of being notorious river thieves and "dakoits," 

 as you, my gentle reader and I should have, and justly too, 

 under similar circumstances and temptations. Looking at the 

 black and attenuated forms of these poor wretches, at their 

 fleshless, knotted, and almost naked lirnbs, altogether so 

 unlike the sturdy well-fed Moosulman peasantry of Eastern 

 Bengal (probably the most prosperous in the whole world), 

 one is disposed to conclude that a full " square " meal of 

 nutritious food is unknown to them. The children appear to 

 pick up a precarious subsistence much in the same fashion as 

 do the few scraggy goats, pigeons, and stunted cattle owned 

 by the plutocracy of the community. A coarse description 

 of rice, a few sickly herbs and vegetables, and some mud- 

 flavoured fish, form for them a diet, barely sufficient in 

 quantity to keep body and soul together, till with a life far 

 shorter than the span of three-score and ten their pains and 

 troubles end. The women and children rarely leave their 

 homes, but the men may be seen plying their canoes half the 

 day, fishing or collecting the seeds of the water-lily, in a 

 silent hopeless sort of way, as if such light labour were too 

 much for their strength and energies ; at other times they 



