386 Note on the Lepchas of Sikkim. [No. 100. 



especially in middle age. The men very often look like women, 

 and the women sometimes like men. The hair is worn long by 

 both sexes, the younger men allowing it to hang loose over the 

 shoulders, the elders plaiting it into a tail, which sometimes 

 reaches to the knees. The women of station wear their hair in 

 two, and sometimes in three tails, tying it with braid and silken 

 cords and tassels. The Lepchas, both male and female, are dirty 

 in person, rarely having recourse to ablution. In the cold and 

 dry season this renders them unpleasant inmates of a close 

 dwelling, but in the rains, when they move about and are fre- 

 quently wet, they are passably clean and sweet. 



The temperament of the Lepcha is eminently cheerful, and 

 his disposition really amiable. In ordinary intercourse they 

 are a very fascinating people, and possess an amount of intelli- 

 gence and rational curiosity not to be met with among their 

 Bhotiah, Limboo, Murmi, or Gurung neighbours, and indeed 

 rarely if ever to be seen among people so completely secluded 

 from foreign intercourse as they always have been. The 

 marked contrast in these respects with the listless, uninquiring 

 native of the plains, renders association with them a source of 

 much pleasure to Europeans. They are wonderfully honest, theft 

 being scarcely known among them ; they rarely quarrel among 

 themselves, and I have never seen them strike one another. 

 ee Do you ever fight }" was asked of an intelligent Lepcha ; 

 " No, never, (was the reply) why should we, all Lepchas are 

 brothers, to fight would be unnatural." For ordinary social 

 purposes of talking, eating, and drinking, they have great una- 

 nimity, but for any more important purposes of resistance to 

 oppression, the pursuit of industry, or trade, their confidence 

 in one another is at a very low pitch ; they fly bad government 

 rather than resist it, and prefer digging for yams in the jungle, 

 and eating wretchedly innutritious vegetables, to enduring even 

 the ordinary annoyances of working for wages. Although they 

 have been called "a military people," I am disposed to con- 

 sider them as wholly averse to arms, in the usual acceptation of 

 the term. If it be military to carry a long knife, bow and 

 arrows, yet to eschew the use of them against their fellow crea- 

 tures, then, are they a military people; if it be not, they are 



