FURTHER EXPERIENCES OF MR. FRESH. 
accepted j even his very fellows declared he was all 
right. He replied he could not resume work without 
a tool ; didn’t they all see the handle of his mamo- 
tie was broken. He was promptly requested to go 
off to ‘the bungalow and take his choice of a tool, as 
plenty were lying there all ready for use. So he walked 
very slowly away as ordered, and did not again return to 
the working place. Search was made for him every- 
where, but he was nowhere to be found. Late in the 
evening a number of his fellows came to the bungalow 
in great distress ; their comrade must have fallen 
down somewhere — killed by doing hard work for 
master. He did not appear at muster next morning, 
and the kangani said he had run away, and as a mat- 
ter of course owed him a large sum of money. It was 
a curious fact that it was always master’s fault 
when a man ran off being heavily in debt. It 
never entered into the heads of the creditors that 
what master did was merely an excuse, probably what 
the intending runaway even wished and was anxiously 
looking out for or purposely provoking. The saving, 
hard-working cooly, who had laid by part of his earnings 
and owed nobody anything, seldom or never ran 
away ; he would gain nothing by this. Having no 
debts to shirk, he would lose by this proceeding in 
forfeiting the amount of pay due to him and by the 
loss of time before taking up work on another estate ; 
whereas your runaway cooly, who is deeply in debt, 
has nothing to lose and everything to gain ; he loses 
one, two, even three months’ pay, which is just a small 
fraction, not worth taking at all into consideration, 
as compared with what he gains by getting rid 
of his creditors. It might be — no doubt frequently 
was — not so much the debt that tempted the runaway 
to abscond, as the interest he was charged upon it. 
The kangani would consider it quite in the usual 
course of business to charge the debtor one rupee per 
month for the loan of ten, which is at the rate of 
120 percent per annum! And this is even a rather low 
calculation ; instances have been brought before the 
notice of the writer in which the rates charged have 
doubled this amount ! The result of this deep-laid finan- 
cial scheme frequently was that the cooly found 
all the savings of his pay went to pay interest of 
money so that there was not the most remote chance 
of his ever being able to discharge the principal. He was 
merely a slave in the hands of his creditor, and all 
his hardly earned wages were transferred from the pay. 
table into the well-bulged-out waist- cloth of his kan- 
gani. This waistcloth was like the '‘tailor’s bag,” 
tight and empty when it arrived at the pay-table on 
a Saturday afternoon, swollen and distended 
