71/E BANIAN TREE. 
43 
dilapidated church, a cemetery with a few old tombs, white- 
washed and bordered with blue by the P. W. Department, 
a bandstand, a monument, the foundations of a jail, and in 
all directions winding roads, with old Banian trees meeting 
overhead, so that you may walk where you will and 
scarcely see the sun. 
At some time or other it entered the mind of somebody 
or other — nothing is known of the when or the who — to 
plant the sides of the roads with these trees, and while the 
walls have been crumbling the trees have been growing. 
This deserted and dismal place was then a civil and 
military station of some note, and those were easy times, 
when the lack of pence did not vex our public men, and 
things were done with a large and liberal mind. Now, too, 
we plant roadside trees. We plant them, and when they 
have grown up and begin to be of some use, we hack them 
down again, because the rain dripping from their leaves is 
supposed to damage the roads. 
I once remonstrated with a muccadum whom I saw 
superintending this work. I told him that even native 
Governments had always regarded the planting of roadside 
trees, to give the weary traveller shade, as an act of piety 
and an antidote to the sins of previous births, and that he 
