622 Notes on the Kasia Hills, and People. [No. 152. 



a good fourth-part of the Kasia peasantry, are rarely seen in England. 

 By help of these good props many of the coal porters will carry two 

 maunds from the mine to Seria ghat, a distance of 1 1 miles. In this 

 muscular developement, they exhibit a remarkable contrast to some 

 other hill tribes of India. Their features can rarely be called hand- 

 some, yet there is often a strong attraction in the frank and manly 

 good humour of their broad Tartar faces, flat noses, thick lips and angu- 

 lar eyes. The children are sometimes very good looking, but beauty in 

 women seldom rises beyond a buxom comeliness, and the open mouth 

 discloses a den of horrors. The females have a full or preponderant 

 share, in out-of-door labour of all sorts. It is a lively scene every morn- 

 ing, when numbers of men, women and children hie to the jungle to cut 

 wood, or forage for a part of the household, almost as important here 

 as in Ireland, — the pigs. Nothing is here of the phlegm or dull loquacity 

 of the natives of the plains. All are full of life and spirits, whistling, sing- 

 ing, screaming, chasing one another, and in short, skylarking in all ways. 

 They dislike early hours, and it is difficult to get them abroad betimes 

 even on extraordinary occasions. They have great powers of industry, 

 but are somewhat capricious in exerting it. Frank and independent in 

 manner, and in spirit too, they have much more manifestly a conscience 

 to distinguish between right and wrong, than any of their neighbours 

 below. Whether they always act up to it is another question, but there 

 were those among my Kasia servants, of whose right feeling, truthful- 

 ness, attachment, and strict uprightness according to their light, I 

 shall ever have a pleasing remembrance. They are fond of money, and 

 of trading, and are neither wanting in courage, nor given to quarrelling. 

 They are apt scholars, and of late have shewn a considerable desire 

 for instruction. The heads of a large village near Cherra invited my 

 good friend, Mr. Jones, Missionary at the station, to reside with them, 

 offering to build him a house, if he would do so. During a tour 

 of part of the hills, in which I had the pleasure of accompanying him 

 in 1842, the people listened to his discourse with decorum, and appa- 

 rently with attention and interest. 



The common food of the people in the vicinity of the plains is rice : 

 in the interior rice, millet, maize, with kuchu, and some other roots 

 and grains peculiar to themselves. Dried fish is a universal article 

 of diet, and is brought from below in vast quantities. Those in the 



