1871.] 
The Country of JBraj. 
37 
dignity by elevation. But on nearer approach they are found to 
consist of labyrinths of the narrowest lanes winding between the 
mud walls of large enclosures, which are rather cattle yards than 
houses. At the base of the hill is ordinarily a broad circle of waste 
land, studded with low trees and hard bushes, which afford grate¬ 
ful shade and pasturage for the herds ; while the large pond, from 
which the earth was dug to construct the village site, supplies them 
throughout the year with water. At sunrise and sunset the 
thoroughfares are all but impassable, as the straggling herds of 
oxen and buffaloes leave and return to the homestead; for in the 
straitened precincts of an ordinary village are stalled every night 
from 500 or 600 to 1000 head of cattle, at least equalling, 
often outnumbering, the human population. The general poverty 
of the district forms the motif of a popular Hindi couplet, in which 
Krishna’s neglect to enrich the land of his birth with any choicer 
product than the karfl or wild caper is cited as an illustration of 
his wilfulness. The lines may be thus done into English: 
Krishna, you see, will never lose his wayward whims and vapours ; 
For Kabul teems with luscious fruit, while Braj boasts only capers. 
However, in the rains, at which season of the year all pilgrimages 
are made, the Jamuna is a mighty stream, a mile or more broad ; 
its many contributory torrents and all the ponds and lakes with 
which the district abounds are filled to overflowing ; the hill side 
is clothed with the foliage of the dho trees, the dusty plain is trans¬ 
formed into a green sward, and the smiling prospect goes far to 
justify the warmest panegyrics of the Hindu poets, whose appre¬ 
ciation of the scenery, it must be remembered, has been further 
intensified by religious enthusiasm. Even at all seasons of the 
year, the landscape has a quiet charm of its own; a sudden turn in 
the winding lane reveals a grassy knoll with stone-built well and 
overhanging pipal; or some sacred grove with dense thicket of 
prickly her and weird pilo trees with clusters of tiny berries and 
strangely gnarled and twisted trunks, entangled in a creeping 
undergrowth of hms and chhonkar and karfl ; and in the centre 
bordered with flowering oleander and niwara, a still, cool lake with 
modest shrine and well-fenced bush of tulsi on the raised terrace, 
from which a broad flight of steps, gift of some thankful pilgrim 
