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



The honey is abundant and of unequalled flavour. A hollowed block 

 of wood forms the hive. 



As is the case with some European nations, the houses of the people 

 are by no means so dirty as their persons. Generally they are dry, sub- 

 stantial thatched cottages, built of a double wall of broad planks placed 

 vertically in the ground, and with a good boarded floor raised three feet 

 or more from the earth. As they have rarely anything like a window, 

 one sees nothing at first entering, and rarely escapes a bruised head 

 from a collision with one of the massive low beams. The fire is always 

 burning on an earthen hearth in the centre. There is no chimney, but 

 one soon gets accustomed to wood smoke. On a swinging frame over 

 the fire is piled the firewood to dry ; the veranda, or space between the 

 two walls, is partly stored with lumber, and partly affords shelter to the 

 fowls, calves and pigs, which last are carefully tended, and attain enor- 

 mous obesity. The people are unacquainted with the saw, and the large 

 planks (in some of the chief houses more than two feet in breadth) of 

 which their dwellings are built, are tediously and wastefully cut from 

 the tree with an adge. 



They use milk in no shape, and it is an article which a traveller mak- 

 ing long marches in the country, must learn to do without. Nor are 

 their cattle, whether goats or oxen, though numerous, applied to any 

 useful purpose in their life time, being kept only for slaughter, and espe- 

 cially for sacrifice. Man is the only bearer of burdens. Their husbandry 

 is confined to the hoe, and their grain is thrashed with the flail. All 

 loads the people carry on the back, supported by a belt across the 

 forehead, and in the rains they and their burdens are protected by um- 

 brellas, in the shape of a large hooded shell of matting, which covers the 

 head and the whole of the back. Dogs they are fond of, and always crop 

 the ears and tail. Wild dogs hunting in packs, are commonly reported 

 to exist in some of the vallies ; and from the descriptions given me of 

 wild oxen called " U-ble massi," or the cattle of God, existing in the 

 neighbourhood of the Bara Pani, I have little doubt that the Gour will 

 be found in those jungles. The worst [feature in the manners of the 

 people, and one likely to be a serious obstacle to the missionary, is the 

 laxity of their marriages ; indeed divorce is so frequent that their unions 

 can hardly be honoured with the name of marriage. The husband does 

 not take his bride to his own home, but enters her household, or visits 



