THE COMMON TEAL. 209 
the crocodiles swarm to such a degree that you dare not 
send in dogs ; and, though I never heard of their touching men 
there, still it is not pleasant to run any such risk, and I used 
to keep a boat two or three hundred yards behind, and men 
on the bank to watch the birds as they floated, but I lost 
many birds thus, snapped up by the crocodiles. 
There is no duck so easy to net and snare as Teal ; and 
thousands, probably taking the empire as a whole, hundreds of 
thousands, are yearly captured and sold. Indeed, but for these 
Teal and Quail, we should many of us fare but poorly during 
the hot season and early part of the rains in the plains of India. 
Tealeries are amongst the greatest of our luxuries, as all 
who have enjoyed them in out-of-the-way places where butch- 
er’s meat was an impossiblity in the hot weather, will, Iam 
sure, allow ; and it may be well to say a few words about their 
construction and management. 
Fresh water, and plenty of it, is the first requisite, and to 
ensure this, the tealery should always be located near the well, 
and every drop of water drawn thence for irrigating the garden 
made to pass through it. The site should be, if possible, under 
some large umbrageous tree, such as we so commonly find 
near garden wells, and to the east of the trunk, so that the 
building may be completely protected from the noontide and 
afternoon sun. You first make a small shallow masonry tank, 
—twelve feet by eight and ten inches in depth is amply large. 
Four feet distant from this all round you build a thick mud wall 
to a height of three feet above the interior. The whole interior 
surface of this wall and the flat space* between it and the 
tank must be lined with pukha masonry, and finished off with 
well-worked chunam. The great points to be aimed at are to 
have the whole lower parts so finished off as to be on the one 
hand impregnable to rats, ichneumons, and snakes ; on the other 
to present no crevice in which dirt, ticks, and other insects can 
lurk. Outside, the walls must be quite smooth, so that no 
snakes can crawl up them. On the wall you build stout 
square pillars, four feet high, on which you place a thick pent 
thatch roof. At the spring of the roof you stretch inside a thin, 
rather loose, ceiling-cloth to prevent the birds hurting their 
heads when they start up suddenly, as they will, at first, on any 
alarm, and especially when the sweeper goes in to wash out 
the place. The interspaces between the pillars you fill in with 
well-made cross-work (jaffrz) of split bamboo, except one of 
them in which you place a door of similar work made with 
slips of wood. You must arrange that all the water both 
enters and leaves the building through gratings impervious to 
snakes and the like marauders. Two or three feet outside the 
walls run a little groove, a ditchlet, in which plant, early in the 
a tS 
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* This should have a slope of about half an inch in the foot, towards the tank. 
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