Concerning animals and other matters

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Ti

CONCERNING ANIMALS
AND OTHER MATTERS

(Frontispiece

“EHA,”

CONCERNING ANIMALS
AND OTHER MATTERS

BY E. H. AITKEN (“EHA ”)

AUTHOR OF “‘ FIVE WINDOWS OF THE SOUL,” ‘“‘ TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER,” ETC.

WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR BY

SURGEON-GENERAL W. B. BANNERMAN
ILM.S., C.S.I.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. A. SHEPHERD
AND A PORTRAIT

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY

1914

CONTENTS

PAGE

‘“EHA”’ . F ‘ . zt ‘ z ‘ Xi
I

FEET AND HANDS . - ‘ : F , $ I
II

BILLS OF BIRDS . 2 - A F - ' 16
III

TAILS . 2 3 3 5 ‘ . - - 29
IV

NOSES . ; 5 j 4 ‘ A » 43
V

EARS. ‘ ; ‘ ‘ ‘ . . . 58

vi CONTENTS

VI

PAGE

TOMMY ‘ ‘ ‘ ’ . . é . 94
VII

THE BARN OWL. : ; : ; ‘: . 82
VIII

DOMESTIC ANIMALS : ; 2 i : - 90
IX

SNAKES ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ : ‘ ‘ . 100
xX

THE INDIAN SNAKE-CHARMER . ‘i i ' . 108
XI

CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE . ‘ ‘ ; ‘ « Lt
XII

THE COBRA BUNGALOW . . . . ° » 123

CONTENTS

XIII

THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

XIV
THE PURBHOO

XV
THE COCONUT TREE

XVI
THE BETEL NUT

XVII
A HINDU FESTIVAL

XVIII
INDIAN POVERTY .

id
XIX

BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

vii

PAGE

135

143

150

164

174

181

189

SPECIAL thanks are due to the Editors and
Proprietors of the Strand Magazine, Pall
Mall Magazine and Times of India for their
courtesy in permitting the reprinting of the
articles in this book which originally appeared
in their columns,

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HALF-TONES

“BHA”? 2 ‘ ‘ : : : . Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
THE NOSE OF THE ELEPHANT BECOMING A HAND HAS RE-

DEEMED ITS MIND . F . F F F ; 8
GOOD FOR ANY ROUGH JOB . ‘ 2 5 : . 18
HERE THE COMPETITION HAS BEEN VERY KEEN INDEED . 24

THE RAT IS A NEAR RELATION OF THE SQUIRREL ZOOLOGI-
CALLY, BUT PERSONALLY HE IS A GUTTER-SNIPE, AND
YOU MAY KNOW THAT BY ONE LOOK AT THE TAIL, WHICH

HE DRAGS AFTER HIM LIKE A DIRTY ROPE ‘ . 30
A BLACKBIRD AND A STARLING—THE ONE LIFTS ITS SKIRTS,

WHILE THE OTHER WEARS A WALKING DRESS . - 38
THE NOSTRILS OF THE APTERYX ARE AT THE TIP OF ITS

BEAK . : . : F F ‘ - 48
THE LONG-NOSED MONKEY . ‘ . ‘i F - 54

LINE BLOCKS

PAGE

AN AUTHENTIC STANDARD FOOT ° 7 fs ‘ 2
THESE BEASTS ARE ALL CLODHOPPERS, AND THEIR FEET
ARE HOBNAILED BOOTS , ‘ . : é 6
IT HAS TO DOUBLE THEM UNDER AND HOBBLE ABOUT LIKE
A CHINESE LADY . . 5 c - ‘ - to
ix

2

x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NO DOUBT EACH BIRD SWEARS BY ITS OWN PATTERN. 1g
ITS BILL DESERVES STUDY . ‘ ‘ i ; . 22
AS WONDERFUL AS THE PELICAN, BUT HOW OPPOSITE! . 25
THERE ARE SOME ECCENTRICS, SUCH AS JENNY WREN, WHICH

HAVE DESPISED THEIR TAILS . j : . - 35
AT THE SIGHT OF A RIVAL THE DOG HOLDS ITS TAIL UP

STIFFLY , . : ‘ ‘ j i ‘ - 40
A SHREW CAN DO IT, BUT NOT A MAN . : ‘ . 44
A BOLD ATTEMPT TO GROW IN THE CASE OF A TAPIR . 50
I HAVE SEEN HUMAN NOSES OF A PATTERN NOT UNLIKE THIS,

BUT THEY ARE NOT CONSIDERED ARISTOCRATIC - 54
WHO CAN CONSIDER THAT NOSE SERIOUSLY ? . . - 55
OR PERHAPS WHEN IT WANTS TO LISTEN IT RAISES A FLIPPER

TO ITS EAR . : 3 : : ; ; . 61
“TEAR OUT THE HOUSE LIKE THE DOGS WUZ ATTER HIM” 64
A GREAT CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF DISTINGUISHED EARS . 66

THE CURLS OF A MOTHER’S DARLING. : ; 4. 9

INTRODUCTION

“BHA ”

EDWARD HAMILTON AITKEN, the author of the
following sketches, was well known to the present
generation of Anglo-Indians, by his pen-name of
Eha, as an accurate and amusing writer on natural
history subjects. Those who were privileged to
know him intimately, as the writer of this sketch did,
knew him as a Christian gentleman of singular
simplicity and modesty and great charm of manner.
He was always ready to help a fellow-worker in
science or philanthropy if it were possible for him
todoso. Thus, indeed, began the friendship between
us. For when plague first invaded India in 1896,
the writer was one of those sent to Bombay to
work at the problem of its causation from the
scientific side, thereby becoming interested in the
life history of rats, which were shown to be inti-
mately connected with the spread of this dire
disease. Having for years admired Eha’s books
on natural history—The Tribes on my Frontier,
An Indian Naturalist’s Foreign Policy, and The

x1

xii INTRODUCTION

Naturalist on the Prowl, I ventured to write to him
on the subject of rats and their habits, and asked
him whether he could not throw some light on
the problem of plague and its spread, from the
naturalist’s point of view.

In response to this appeal he wrote a most in-
forming and characteristic article for The Times of
India (July 19, 1899), which threw a flood of light
on the subject of the habits and characteristics of
the Indian rat as found in town and country. He
was the first to show that Mus rattus, the old
English black rat, which is the common house rat
of India outside the large seaports, has become,
through centuries of contact with the Indian people,
a domestic animal like the cat in Britain. When
one realises the fact that this same rat is responsible
for the spread of plague in India, and that every
house is full of them, the value of this naturalist’s
observation is plain. Thus began an intimacy
which lasted till Eha’s death in 1go9.

The first time I met Mr. Aitken was at a meeting
of the Free Church of Scotland Literary Society in
1899, when he read a paper on the early experiences
of the English in Bombay. The minute he entered
the room I recognised him from the caricatures of
himself in the Tvibes. The long, thin, erect, bearded
man was unmistakable, with a typically Scots face
lit up with the humorous twinkle one came to
know so well. Many a time in after-years has that
look been seen as he discoursed, as only he could,

INTRODUCTION xiii

on the ways of man and beast, bird or insect, as
one tramped with him through the jungles on the
hills around Bombay during week-ends spent with
him at Vehar or elsewhere. He was an ideal com-
panion on such occasions, always at his best when
acting the part of The Naturalist on the Prowl.

Mr. Aitken was born at Satara in the Bombay
Presidency on August 16, 1851. His father was
the Rev. James Aitken, missionary of the Free
Church of Scotland. His mother was a sister of
the Rev. Daniel Edward, missionary to the Jews
at Breslau for some fifty years. He was educated
by his father in India, and one can well realise the
sort of education he got from such parents from
the many allusions to the Bible and its old Testa-
ment characters that one constantly finds used
with such effect in his books. His farther education
was obtained at Bombay and Poona. He passed
M.A. and B.A. of Bombay University first on the
list, and won the Homejee Cursetjee prize with a
poem in 1880. From 1870 to 1876 he was Latin
Reader in the Deccan College at Poona, which
accounts for the extensive acquaintance with the
Latin classics so charmingly manifest in his writings.
That he was well grounded in Greek is also certain,
for the writer, while living in a chummery with
him in Bombay in 1902, saw him constantly reading
the Greek Testament in the mornings without the
aid of a dictionary.

He entered the Customs and Salt Department

xiv INTRODUCTION

of the Government of Bombay in April 1876, and
served in Kharaghoda (the Dustypore of the Tribes),
Uran, North Kanara and Goa Frontier, Ratnagiri,
and Bombay itself. In May, 1903, he was appointed
Chief Collector of Customs and Salt Revenue at
Karachi, and in November, 1905, was made Superin-
tendent in charge of the District Gazetteer of
Sind. He retired from the service in August 1906.

He married in 1883 the daughter of the Rev. J.
Chalmers Blake, and left a family of two sons and
three daughters.

In 1902 he was deputed, on special duty, to in-
vestigate the prevalence of malaria at the Customs
stations along the frontier of Goa, and to devise
means for removing the Salt Peons at these posts,
from the neighbourhood of the anopheles mosquito,
by that time recognised as the cause of the deadly
malaria, which made service on that frontier
dreaded by all.

It was during this expedition that he discovered
a new species of anopheline mosquito, which after
identification by Major James, I.M.S., was named
after him Anopheles aitkeni. During his long service
there are to be found in the Annual Reports of the
Customs Department frequent mention of Mr.
Aitken’s good work, but it is doubtful whether
the Government ever fully realised what an able
literary man they had in their service, wasting his
talent in the Salt Department. On two occasions
only did congenial work come to him in the course

INTRODUCTION Xv

of his public duty—namely, when he was sent to
study, from the naturalist’s point of view, the
malarial conditions prevailing on the frontier of
Goa; and when during the last two years of his
service he was put in literary charge of The Sind
Gazetteer. In this book one can see the light and
graceful literary touch of Eha frequently cropping
up amidst the dry bones of public health and
commercial statistics, and the book is enlivened
by innumerable witty and philosophic touches
appearing in the most unlikely places, such as he
alone could enliven a dull subject with. Would
that all Government gazetteers were similarly
adorned! But there are not many ‘‘Ehas” in
Government employ in India.

On completion of this work he retired to Edinburgh,
where most of the sketches contained in this volume
were written. He was very happy with his family
in his home at Morningside, and was beginning to
surround himself with pets and flowers, as was his
wont all his life, and to get a good connection with
the home newspapers and magazines, when, alas!
death stepped in, and he died after a short illness
on April 25, 1909.

He was interested in the home birds and beasts
as he had been with those in India, and the last
time the writer met him he was taking home some
gold-fish for his aquarium. A few days before his
death he had found his way down to the Morning-
side cemetery, where he had been enjoying the sun-

xvi INTRODUCTION

shine and flowers of Spring, and he remarked to
his wife that he would often go there in future to
watch the birds building their nests.

Before that time came, he was himself laid to
rest in that very spot in sure and certain hope of
a blessed resurrection.

The above imperfect sketch fails to give the charm
and magnetic attraction of the man, and for this
one must go to his works, which for those who
knew him are very illuminating in this respect.
In them one catches a glimpse of his plan for
keeping young and cheerful in “‘ the land of regrets,”’
for one of his charms was his youthfulness and
interest in life. He refused to be depressed by
his lonely life. ‘I am only an exile,’ he remarks,
“endeavouring to work a successful existence in
Dustypore, and not to let my environment shape
me as a pudding takes the shape of its mould,
but to make it tributary to my own happiness.”
He therefore urges his readers to cultivate a hobby.

“Tt is strange,” he says, “that Europeans in
India know so little, see so little, care so little,
about all the intense life that surrounds them.
The boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters,
or the most enthusiastic of bird-nesters in England,
where one shilling will buy nearly all that is known,
or can be known, about birds or butterflies, main-
tains in this country, aided by Messrs. B. &. S.,
an unequal strife with the insupportableness of an
ennui-smitten life. Why, if he would stir up for

INTRODUCTION xvii

one day the embers of the old flame, he could not
quench it again with such a prairie of fuel around
him. I am not speaking of Bombay people, with
their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for
oiling the wheels of existence, but of the dreary
up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a moral
Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed. What
such aone needs is ahobby. Every hobby is good—
a sign of good and an influence for good. Any
hobby will draw out the mind, but the one I plead
for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human
kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into
the prosiest life. That all my own finer feelings
have not long since withered in this land of separa-
tion from ‘old familiar faces,’ I attribute partly
to a pair of rabbits. All rabbits are idiotic things,
but these come in and sit up meekly and beg a crust
of bread, and even a perennial fare of village moorgee
cannot induce me to issue the order for their
execution and conversion into pie. But if such
considerations cannot lead, the struggle for existence
should drive a man in this country to learn the
ways of his border tribes. For no one, I take it,
who reflects for an instant will deny that a small
mosquito, with black rings upon a white ground,
or a sparrow that has finally made up its mind to
rear a family in your ceiling, exercises an influence
on your personal happiness far beyond the Czar of
the Russias. It is not a question of scientific
frontiers—the enemy invades us on all sides. We

3

xviii INTRODUCTION

are plundered, insulted, phlebotomised under our
own vine and fig-tree. We might make head
against the foe if we laid to heart the lesson our
national history in India teaches—namely, that
the way to fight uncivilised enemies is to encourage
them to cut one another’s throats, and then step
in and inherit the spoil. But we murder our friends,
exterminate our allies, and then groan under the
oppression of the enemy. I might illustrate this
by the case of the meek and long-suffering musk-rat,
by spiders or ants, but these must wait another
day.”

Again he,says, ‘‘ The ‘poor dumb animals’ can
give each otNer a bit of their minds like their betters,
and to me their fierce and tender little passions,
their loves and hates, their envies and jealousies,
and their small vanities beget a sense of fellow-
feeling which makes their presence society. The
touch of Nature which makes the whole world kin
is infirmity. A man without a weakness is insup-
portable company, and so is a man who does not
feel the heat. There is a large grey ring-dove that
sits in the blazing sun all through the hottest
hours of the day, and says coo-coo, coo, Co0-coo0, Coo
until the melancholy sweet monotony of that sound
is as thoroughly mixed up in my brain with 110°
in the shade as physic in my infantile memories
with the peppermint lozenges which used to “ put
away the taste.” But as for these creatures, which
confess the heat and come into the house and gasp,

INTRODUCTION xix

I feel drawn to them. I should like to offer them
cooling drinks. Not that all my midday guests
are equally welcome: I could dispense, for instance,
with the grey-ringed bee which has just recon-
noitred my ear for the third time, and guesses it
is a key-hole—she is away just now, but only, I
fancy, for clay to stop it up with. There are
others also to which I would give their congé if they
would take it. But good, bad, or indifferent they
give us their company whether we want it or
not.”

Eha certainly found company in beasts all his
life, and kept the charm of youth about him in
consequence to the end. If his lot were cast, as
it often was, in lonely places, he kept pets, and
made friends besides of many of the members of
the tribes on his frontier; if in Bombay city he
consoled himself with his aquarium and the museum
of the Bombay Natural History Society. When
the present writer chummed with him in a flat
on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he remembers
well that aquarium and the Sunday-morning expedi-
tions to the malarious ravines at the back of Malabar
Hill to search for mosquito larve to feed its inmates.
For at that time Mr. Aitken was investigating
the capabilities for the destruction of larve, of a
small surface-feeding fish with an ivory-white spot
on the top of its head, which he had found at
Vehar in the stream below the bund. It took
him some time to identify these particular fishes

XX INTRODUCTION

(Haplochilus lineatus), and in the meantime he
dubbed them ‘“‘Scooties’”? from the lightning
rapidity of their movements, and in his own
admirable manner made himself a sharer of their
joys and sorrows, their cares and interests. With
these he stocked the ornamental fountains of Bom-
bay to keep them from becoming breeding-grounds
for mosquitoes, and they are now largely used
throughout India for this very purpose. It will be
recognised, therefore, that Mr. Aitken studied natural
history not only for its own sake, but as a means
of benefiting the people of India, whom he had
learned to love, as is so plainly shown in Behind
the Bungalow.

He was an indefatigable worker in the museum
of the Bombay Natural History Society, which he
helped to found, and many of his papers and notes
are preserved for us in the pages of its excellent
Journal, of which he was an original joint-editor.
He was for long secretary of the Insect Section, and
then president. Before his retirement he was
elected one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society.

Mr. Aitken was a deeply religious man, and was
for some twenty years an elder in the congregation
of the United Free Church of Scotland in Bombay.
He was for some years Superintendent of the Sunday
School in connection with this congregation, and a
member of the Committee of the Bombay Scottish
Orphanage and the Scottish High Schools. His
former minister says of him, ‘“ He was deeply inter-

INTRODUCTION XXi

ested in theology, and remained wonderfully orthodox
in spite of’ (or, as the present writer would prefer
to say, because of) “his scientific knowledge. He
always thought that the evidence for the doctrine
of evolution had been pressed for more than it was
worth, and he had many criticisms to make upon
the Higher Critics of the Bible. Many a discussion
we had, in which, against me, he took the conserva-
tive side.”

He lets one see very clearly into the workings of
his mind in this direction in what is perhaps the
finest, although the least well known of his books,
The Five Windows of the Soul (John Murray), in
which he discourses in his own inimitable way of
the five senses, and how they bring man and beast
into contact with their surroundings. It is a book
on perceiving, and shows how according as this
‘faculty is exercised it makes each man such as
he is. The following extract from the book shows
Mr. Aitken’s style, and may perhaps induce some
to go to the book itself for more from the same
source. He is speaking of the moral sense. “ And
it is almost a truism to say that, if a man has any
taste, it will show itself in his dress and in his dwell-
ing. No doubt, through indolence and slovenly
habits, a man may allow his surroundings to fall
far below what he is capable of approving; but
every one who does so pays the penalty in the
gradual deterioration of his perceptions.

‘‘How many times more true is all this in the case

xxii INTRODUCTION

of the moral sense? When the heart is still young
and tender, how spontaneously and sweetly and
urgently does every vision of goodness and noble-
ness in the conduct of another awaken the impulse
to go and do likewise! And if that impulse is not
obeyed, how certainly does the first approving
perception of the beauty of goodness become duller,
until at last we may even come to hate it where
we find it, for its discordance with the ‘ motions of
sins in our members’ !

“But not less certainly will every earnest effort to
bring the life into unison with what we perceive
to be right bring its own reward in a clearer and
more. joyful perception of what is right, and a
keener sensitiveness to every discord in ourselves.
How all such discord may be removed, how the
chords of the heart may be tuned and the life
become music,—these are questions of religion,
which are quite beyond our scope. But I take it
that every religion which has prevailed among the
children of Adam is in itself an evidence that, how-
ever debased and perverted the moral sense may
have become, the painful consciousness that his
heart is ‘like sweet bells jangled’ still presses
everywhere and always on the spirit of man; and
it is also a conscious or unconscious admission that
there is no blessedness for him until his life shall
march in step with the music of the ‘Eternal
Righteousness.’ ”’

Mr. Aitken’s name will be kept green among

INTRODUCTION xxiii

Anglo-Indians by the well-known series of books
published by Messrs. Thacker & Co., of London
and Calcutta. They are The Tribes on my Frontier,
An Indian Naturalist’s Foreign Policy, which was
published in 1883, and of which a seventh edition
appeared in 1910. This book deals with the common
birds, beasts, and insects in and around an Indian
bungalow, and it should be put into the hands of
every one whose lot is cast in India. It will open
their eyes to the beauty and interests of their
surroundings in a truly wonderful way, and may
be read again and again with increasing pleasure
aS one’s experience of Indian life increases.

This was followed in 1889 by Behind the Bungalow,
which describes with charming insight the strange
manners and customs of our Indian domestic ser-
vants. The witty and yet kindly way in which
their excellencies and defects are touched off is
delightful, and many a harassed mem-sahib must
bless Eha for showing her the humorous and human
side of her life surrounded as it is by those necessary
but annoying inhabitants of the Godowns behind
the bungalow. A tenth edition of this book was
published in rgrr.

The Naturalist on the Prowl was brought out in
1894, and a third edition was published in 1905.
It contains sketches on the same lines as those in
The Tribes, but deals more with the jungles, and
not so much with the immediate surroundings of
the bungalow. The very smell of the country is

xxiv INTRODUCTION

in these chapters, and will vividly recall memories
to those who know the country along the West
Coast of India southward of Bombay.

In 1900 was published The Common Birds of
Bombay, which contains descriptions of the ordinary
birds one sees about the bungalow or in the country.
As is well said by the writer of the obituary notice
in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History
Society, Eha ‘‘ had a special genius for seizing the
striking and characteristic points in the appearance
and behaviour of individual species and a happy
knack of translating them into print so as to render
his descriptions unmistakable. He looked upon all
creatures in the proper way, as if each had a soul
and character of its own. He loved them all,
and was unwilling to hurt any of them.” These
characteristics are well shown in this book, for one
is able to recognise the birds easily from some
prominent feature described therein.’

The Five Windows of the Soul, published by John
Murray in 1898, is of quite another character from
the above, and was regarded by its author with
great affection as the best of his books. It is
certainly a wonderfully self-revealing book, and full
of the most beautiful thoughts. A second impression

1 The illustrations are his own work, but the blocks having
been produced in India, they do not do justice to the extreme
delicacy of workmanship and fine perception of detail which

characterise the originals, as all who have been privileged to see
these will agree.

INTRODUCTION XXV

appeared in the following year, and a new and
cheaper edition has just been published.

The portrait of Eha is reproduced from one taken
in 1902 in a flat on the Apollo Bunder, and shows
the man as he was in workaday life in Bombay.
The humorous and kindly look is, I think, well
brought out, and will stir pleasant memories in all
who knew Mr. Aitken.

W. B. B.

MADRAS,
January 1914.

CONCERNING ANIMALS

I
FEET AND HANDS

It is evident that, in what is called the evolution
of animal forms, the foot came in suddenly when
the backboned creatures began to live on the dry
land—that is, with the frogs. How it came in is
a question which still puzzles the phylogenists, who
cannot find a sure pedigree for the frog. There it
is, anyhow, and the remarkable point about it is
that the foot of a frog is not a rudimentary thing,
but an authentic standard foot, like the yard measure
kept in the Tower of London, of which all other feet
are copies or adaptations. This instrument, as
part of the original outfit given to the pioneers of
the brainy, backboned, and four-limbed races,
when they were sent out to multiply and replenish
the earth, is surely worth considering well. It
consists essentially of a sole, or palm, made up of
small bones and of five separate digits, each with
several joints.

In the hind foot of a frog the toes are very long
and webbed from point to point. In this it differs

2 FEET AND HANDS

a good deal from the toad, and there is significance
in the difference. The ‘‘ heavy-gaited toad,” satis-
fied with sour ants, hard beetles, and such other
fare as it can easily pick up, and grown nasty in
consequence,
so that no-
thing seeks to
eat it, has
hobbled
through life,
like a ple-
thoric old
gentleman,
until the
present day,
on its original
feet. The
more versatile
and nimble-
witted frog,
AN AUTHENTIC STANDARD FOOT, seeking better

diet and

greater security of life, went back to the element in
which it was bred, and, swimming much, became
better fitted for swimming. The soft elastic skin
between the fingers or toes is just the sort of tissue
which responds most readily to inward impulses,
and we find that the very same change has come
about in those birds and beasts which live much in
water. I know that this is not the accepted theory

ABOUT LEGS 3

of evolution, but I am waiting till it shall become so.
We all develop in the direction of our tendencies,
and shall, I doubt not, be wise enough some day
to give animals leave to do the same.

It seems strange that any creature, furnished with
such tricky and adaptable instruments to go about
the world with, should tire of them and wish to get
rid of them, but so it happened at a very early stage.
It must have been a consequence, I think, of growing
too fast. Mark Twain remarked about a dachshund
that it seemed to want another pair of legs in the
middle to prevent it sagging. Now, some lizards
are so long that they cannot keep from sagging, and
their progress becomes a painful wriggle. But if
you must go by wriggling, then what is the use of
legs to knock against stems and stones? So some
lizards have discarded two of their legs and some all
four. Zoologically they are not snakes, but snakes
are only a further advance in the same direction.
That snakes did not start fair without legs is clear,
for the python has to this day two tell-tale leg-bones
buried in its flesh.

When we pass from reptiles to birds, lo! an
astounding thing has happened. That there were
flying reptiles in the fossil ages we know, and there
are flying beasts in our own. But the wings of these
are simple mechanical alterations, which the imagina-
tion of a child, or a savage, could explain.

The hands of a bat are hands still, and, though
the fingers are hampered by their awkward gloves,

4 FEET AND HANDS

the thumbs are free. The giant fruit bats of the
tropics clamber about the trees quite acrobatically
with their thumbs and feet.

That Apollyonic monster of the prime, the ptero-
dactyl, did even better. Stretching on each little
finger a lateen sail that would have served to waft
a skiff across the Thames, it kept the rest of its hands
for other uses. But what bearing has all this on the
case of birds? Here is a whole sub-kingdom, as
they call it, of the animal world which has un-
reservedly and irrevocably bartered one pair of its
limbs for a flying-machine. The apparatus is made
of feathers—a new invention, unknown to amphibian
or saurian, whence obtained nobody can say—and
these are grafted into the transformed frame of the
old limbs. The bargain was worth making, for the
winged bird at once soared away in all senses from
the creeping things of earth, and became a more
ethereal being; ‘‘like a blown flame, it rests upon
the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it; it is
the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling
itself.” But the price was heavy. The bird must
get through life with one pair of feet and its mouth.
But this was all the bodily furniture of Charles
Francois Felu, who, without arms, became a famous
artist.

A friend of mine, standing behind him in a salon
and watching him at work, saw him lay down his
brush and, raising his foot to his head, take off his
hat and scratch his crown with his great toe. My

ABOUT TOES 5

friend was nearly hypnotised by the sight, yet it
scarcely strikes us as a wonder when a parrot, standing
on one foot, takes its meals with the other. It is
a wonder, and stamps the parrot as a bird of talent.
A mine of hidden possibilities is in us all, but those
who dig resolutely into it and bring out treasure
are few.

And let us note that the art of standing began
with birds. Frogs sit, and, as far as I know, every
reptile, be it lizard, crocodile, alligator, or tortoise,
lays its body on the ground when not actually carry-
ing it. And these have each four fat legs. Contrast
the flamingo, which, having only two, and those
like willow wands, tucks up one of them and sleeps
poised high on the other, like a tulip on its stem.

Note also that one toe has been altogether dis-
carded by birds as superfluous. The germ, or bud,
must be there, for the Dorking fowl has produced a
fifth toe under some influence of the poultry-yard,
but no natural bird has more than four. Except
in swifts, which never perch, but cling to rocks and
walls, one is turned backwards, and, by a cunning
contrivance, the act of bending the leg draws
them all automatically together. So a hen closes
its toes at every step it takes, as if it grasped some-
thing, and, of course, when it settles down on its
roost, they grasp that tight and hold it fast till
morning. But to birds that do not perch this
mechanism is only an encumbrance, so many of
them, like the plovers, abolish the hind toe entirely,

6 FEET AND HANDS

and the prince of all two-legged runners, the ostrich,
has got rid of one of the front toes also, retaining
only two.

To a man who thinks, it is very interesting to
observe that beasts have been led along gradually
in the very same direction. All the common beasts,
such as cats, dogs, rats, stoats, and so on, have five
ordinary toes. On the hind feet there may be only
four. Butas
soon as we
cometothose
that feed on
grass and
leaves,
standing or
walking all
the while, we
find that the
feet are shod
with hoofs
instead of
being tipped

with claws.
THESE BEASTS ARE ALL CLODHOPPERS, AND THEIR s.
FEET ARE HOBNAILED BOOTS, First the five

toes, though
clubbed together, have each a separate hoof, as in
the elephant ; then the hippopotamus follows with
four toes, and the rhinoceros with practically three.
These beasts are all clodhoppers, and their feet are
hobnailed boots. The more active deer and all

FEET AND THE BRAIN 7

cattle keep only two toes for practical purposes,
though stumps of two more remain. Finally, the
horse gathers all its foot into one boot, and becomes
the champion runner of the world.

It is not without significance that this degeneracy
of the feet goes with a decline in the brain, whether
as cause or effect I will not pretend toknow. These
hoofed beasts have shallow natures and live shallow
lives. They eat what is spread by Nature before
their noses, have no homes, and do nothing but feed
and fight with each other. The elephant is a notable
exception, but then the nose of the elephant, be-
coming a hand, has redeemed its mind. As for the
horse, whatever its admirers may say, it is just a
great ass. There is a lesson in all this: ‘‘ from him
that hath not shall be taken even that which he
hath.”

There is another dull beast which, from the point
of view of the mere systematist, seems as far removed
from those that wear hoofs as it could be, but the
philosopher, considering the point at which it has
arrived, rather than the route by which it got there,
will class it with them, for its idea of life is just theirs
turned topsy-turvy. The nails of the sloth, instead
of being hammered into hoofs on the hard ground,
have grown long and curved, like those of a caged
bird, and become hooks by which it can hang, with-
out effort, in the midst of the leaves on which it
feeds. A minimum of intellect is required for such
an existence, and the sloth has lost any superfluous

5

8 FEET AND HANDS

brain that it may have had, as well as two, or even
three, of its five toes.

To return to those birds and beasts with standard
feet, I find that the first outside purpose for which
they find them serviceable is to scratch themselves.
This is a universal need. But a foot is handy in
many other ways. A hen and chickens, getting
into my garden, transferred a whole flower-bed to
the walk in half an hour. Yet a bird trying to do
anything with its foot is like a man putting on his
socks standing, and birds as a race have turned their
feet to very little account outside of their original pur-
pose. Such a simple thing as holding down its food
with one foot scarcely occurs to an ordinary bird. A
hen will pull about a cabbage leaf and shake it in the
hope that a small piece may come away, but it never
enters her head to put her foot onit. In this and other
matters the parrot stands apart, and also the hawk,
eagle, and owl; but these are not ordinary birds.

Beasts, having twice as many feet as birds, have
learned to apply them to many uses. They dig with
them, hold down their food with them, fondle their
children with them, paw their friends, and scratch
their enemies. One does more of one thing and
another of another, and the feet soon show the effects
of the occupation, the claws first, then the muscles,
and even the bones dwindling by disuse, or waxing
stout and strong. Then the joy of doing what it
can do well impels the beast further on the same
path, and its offspring after it,

8]

THE NOSE OF THE ELEPHANT BECOMING A HAND HAS
REDEEMED ITS MIND.

BEAR AND ANT-EATER 9

And this leads at last to specialism. The Indian
black bear is a ‘‘ handy man,” like the British Tar—
good all round. Its great soft paw is a very service-
able tool and weapon, armed with claws which will
take the face off a man or grub up a root with equal
ease. When a black bear has found an ant-hill it
takes but a few minutes to tear up the hard, cemented
clay and lay the deep galleries bare; then, putting
its gutta-percha muzzle to the mouth of each, it
draws such a blast of air through them that the
industrious labourers are sucked into its gullet in
drifts. Afterwards it digs right down to the royal
chamber, licks up the bloated queen, and goes its
way.

But there is another worker in the same mine
which does not go to work this way. The ant-eater
found fat termites so satisfying that it left all other
things and devoted its life to the exploiting of ant-
hills, and now it has no rival at that business, but
it is fit for nothing else. Its awkward digging tools
will not allow it to put the sole of its foot to the
ground, so it has to double them under and hobble
about like a Chinese lady. It has no teeth, and
stupidity is the most prominent feature of its char-
acter. It has become that poor thing, a man of one
idea.

But the bear is like a sign-post at a parting of
the ways. If you compare a brown bear with the
black Indian, or sloth bear, as it is sometimes called,
you may detect a small but pregnant difference.

"AAV ASa.
NIHD V FXI
T LA0
aV ATHHOH ONV AAGNN WAHL
alanod oO.
L SVH LI

Io

VARIOUS PAWS II

When the former walks, its claws are lifted, so that
their points do not touch the ground. Why? I
have no information, but I know that it is not con-
tent with a vegetarian diet, like its black relative,
but hankers after sheep and goats, and I guess that
its murderous thoughts flow down its nerves to those
keen claws. It reminds me of a man clenching his
fist unconsciously when he thinks of the liar who has
slandered him.

But what ages of concentration on the thought
and practice of assassination must have been re-
quired to perfect that most awful weapon in Nature,
the paw of a tiger, or, indeed, of any cat, for they
are all of one pattern. The sharpened flint of the
savage has become the scimitar of Saladin, keeping
the keenness of its edge in a velvet sheath and flashing
out only on the field of battle. Compare that paw
with the foot of a dog, and you will, perhaps, see
with me that the servility and pliancy of the slave
of man has usurped a place in his esteem which is
not its due. The cat is much the nobler animal.
Dogs, with wolves, jackals, and all of their kin, love
to fall upon their victim in overwhelming force, like a
rascally mob, and bite, tear, and worry until the life
has gone out of it; the tiger, rushing single-handed,
with a fearful challenge, on the gigantic buffalo,
grasps its nose with one paw and its shoulder with the
other, and has broken its massive neck in a manner
so dexterous and instantaneous that scarcely two
sportsmen can agree about how the thing is done.

12 FEET AND HANDS

I have said that the foot first appeared when the
backboned creatures came out of the waters to live
upon the dry land. But all mundane things (not
excepting politics) tend to move in circles, ending
where they began; and so the foot, if we follow it
far enough, will take us back into water. See how
the rat—I mean our common, omnivorous, scaven-
ging, thieving, poaching brown rat—when it lives
near a pond or stream, learns to swim and dive as
naturally as a duck. Next comes the vole, or
water-rat, which will not live away from water.
Then there are water shrews, the beaver, otter,
duck-billed platypus, and a host of others, not
related, just as, among birds, there are water ousels,
moorhens, ducks, divers, etc., which have per-
manently made the water their home and seek their
living in it. All these have attained to web-footed-
ness in a greater or less degree.

That this has occurred among reptiles, beasts,
and birds alike shows what an easy, or natural, or
obvious (put it as you will) modification it is. And
it has a consequence not to be escaped. Just as a
man who rides a great deal and never walks acquires
a certain indirectness of the legs, and you never
mistake a jockey for a drill-sergeant, so the web-
footed beasts are not among the things that are
“comely in going.”

Following this road you arrive at the seal and sea-
lion. Of all the feet that I have looked at I know
only one more utterly ridiculous than the twisted

SEALS AND SEA-LIONS 13

flipper on which the sea-lion props his great bulk in
front, and that is the forked fly-flap which extends
from the hinder parts of the same. How can it be
worth any beast’s while to carry such an absurd
apparatus with it just for the sake of getting out into
the air sometimes and pushing itself about on the
ice and being eaten by Polar bears? The porpoise
has discarded one pair, turned the other into decent
fins, and recovered a grace and power of motion in
water which are not equalled by the greyhound on
land. Why have the seals hung back? I believe
I know the secret. It is the baby! No one knows
where the porpoise and the whale cradle their new-
born infants—it is so difficult to pry into the domestic
ways of these sea-people—but evidently the seals
cannot manage it, so they are forced to return to the
land when the cares of-maternity are on them.

I have called the feet of these sea beasts ridiculous
things, and so they are as we see them; but strip
off the skin, and lo! there appears a plain foot,
with its five digits, each of several joints, tipped
with claws—nowise essentially different, in short,
from that with which the toad, or frog, first set out
in a past too distant for our infirm imagination.
Admiration itself is paralysed by a contrivance so
simple, so transmutable, and so sufficient for every
need that time and change could bring.

There remains yet one transformation which
seems simple compared with some that I have
noticed, but is more full of fate than they all; for

14 FEET AND HANDS

by it the foot becomes a hand. This comes about
by easy stages. The reason why one of a bird’s four
toes is turned back is quite plain: trees are the
proper home of birds, and they require feet that will
grasp branches. So those beasts also that have
taken to living in trees have got one toe detached
more or less from the rest and arranged so that it
can co-operate with them to catch hold of a thing.
Then other changes quickly follow. For, in judging
whether you have got hold of a thing and how much
force you must put forth to keep hold of it, you are
guided entirely by the pressure on the finger-points,
and to gauge this pressure nicely the nerves must be
refined and educated. In fact, the exercise itself,
with the intent direction of the mind to the finger-
points, brings about the refinement and education
in accordance with Sandow’s principle of muscle
culture.

For an example of the result do not look at the
gross paw of any so-called anthropoid ape, gorilla,
orang-outang, or chimpanzee, but study the gentle
lemur. At the point of each digit is a broad elastic
pad, plentifully supplied with delicate nerves, and
the vital energy which has been directed into them
appears to have been withdrawn from the growth of
the claws, which have shrunk into fine nails just
shielding the fleshy tips. In short, the lemur has
a hand on each of its four limbs, and no feet at all.
And as it goes about its cage—I am at the Zoo in
spirit—with a silent wonder shining out of its great

APES AND LEMURS : 15

eyes, it examines things by feeling them with its
hands.

How plainly a new avenue from the outer world
into its mind has been opened by those fingers!
But how about scratching ? What would be the gain
of having higher susceptibilities and keener percep-
tions if they only aggravated the triumph of the
insulting flea? Nay, this disaster has been averted
by reserving a good sharp claw on the forefinger
(not the thumb) of each hind hand.

The old naturalists called the apes and lemurs
Quadrumana, the ‘“‘four-handed,” and separated
the Bimana, with one species—namely, Homo sapiens.
Now we have anatomy cited to belittle the difference
between a hand and a foot, and geology importuned
to show us the missing link, pending which an order
has been instituted roomy enough to hold monkeys,
gorillas, and men. It is a strange perversity. How
much more fitting it were to bow in reverent ignor-
ance before the perfect hand, taken up from the
ground, no more to dull its percipient surfaces on
earth and stones and bark, but to minister to its
lord’s expanding mind and obey his creative will,
while his frame stands upright and firm upon a
single pair of true feet, with their toes all in one
rank.

II
BILLS OF BIRDS

THE prospectus, or advertisement, of a certain
American typewriting machine commences by in-
forming the public that ‘‘ The —— typewriter is
founded on an idea.’”” When I saw this phrase I
secured it for my collection, for I felt that, without
jest, it contained the kernel of a true philosophy of
Nature. The forms, the phainomena, of Nature are
innumerable, multifarious, interwoven, and infinitely
perplexing, and you may spend a happy life in un-
ravelling their relations and devising their evolu-
tions; but until you have looked through them
and seen the ideas that are behind them you are a
mere materialist and a blind worker. The soul of
Nature is hid from you.

What is the bill of a bird and what does it mean?
I do not refer to the bill of a hawk, or a heron, or
an owl, or an ostrich, but to that which is the
abstract of all these and a thousand more. I hold,
regardless of anatomy and physiology, that a bird
is a higher being than a beast. No beast soars and

sings to its sweetheart ; no beast remains in lifelong
16

FOR EATING PURPOSES 17

partnership with the wife of its youth; no beast
builds itself a summer-house and decks it with
feathers and bright shells. A beast is a grovelling
denizen of the earth; a bird is a free citizen of the
air. And who can say that there is not a connection
between this difference and other developments ?
The beast, thinking only of its appetites, has evolved
a delicate nose, a discriminating palate, three kinds
of teeth to cut, tear, and grind its food, salivary
glands to moisten the same, and a perfected apparatus
of digestion.

The bird, occupied with thoughts of love and
beauty, with “fields, or waves, or mountains”’ and
“shapes of sky or plain,” has made little advance
in the art and instruments of good living. It
swallows its food whole, scarcely knowing the taste
of it, and a pair of forceps for picking it up, tipped
and cased with horn, is the whole of its dining
furniture. For the bill of a bird, primarily and
essentially, is that and nothing else. In the chickens
and the sparrows that come to steal their food, and
the robin that looks on, and all the little dicky-
birds, you may see it in its simplicity. The size and
shape may vary, as a Canadian axe differs from a
Scotch axe; some are short and stout and have a
sharp edge for shelling seeds; some are longer and
fine-pointed, for picking worms and caterpillars out
of their hiding-places ; some a little hooked at their
points, and one, that of the crossbill, with points
crossed for picking the small seeds out of fir-cones ;

18 BILLS OF BIRDS

but all are practically the same tool. Yet the last
distinctly points the way to those modifications by
which the simple bill is gradually adapted to one
special purpose or another, until it becomes a wonder-
ful mechanism in which the original intention is
quite out of sight.

At this point I find an instructive parable in my
tool chest. Fully half of the tools are just knives.
A chisel is a knife, a plane is a knife set in a block of
wood, a saw is a knife with the edge notched. More-
over, there are many sorts of curious planes and
saws, each intended for one distinct kind of fine work.
All these the joiner has need of, but a schoolboy
would rather have one good, strong pocket-knife
than the whole boxful. For, just in proportion as
each tool is perfected for its own special work, it
becomes useless for any other. And your schoolboy
is not a specialist. He wants a tool that will cut a
stick, carve a boat, peel an apple, dig out a worm—
in short, one that will do whatever his active mind
wants done.

Now apply this parable to the birds. If you see a
bill that is nothing but a large and powerful pair of
forceps, good for any rough job, you may know
without further inquiry that the owner is no limited
specialist, but a ‘‘ handy man,” bold, enterprising,
resourceful, and good all round. He will not starve
in the desert. No wholesome food comes amiss to
him—grub, slug, or snail, fruit, eggs, a live mouse
or a dead rat, and he can deal with them all. Such

18]

GOOD FOR ANY ROUGH JOB.

INDIVIDUALITY OF BILLS 19

are the magpie, the crow, the jackdaw, and all of
that ilk; and these are the birds that are found
in all countries and climates, and prosper wherever
they go. .

But all birds cannot play that part. One is timid,

NO DOUBT EACH BIRD SWEARS BY ITS OWN PATTERN.

another fastidious, another shy but ingenious. So,
in the universal competition for a living, each has
taken its own line according to the bent of its nature,
and its one tool has been perfected for its trade until
it can follow no other. The thrush catches such
worms as rashly show themselves above-ground ;
but an ancient ancestor of the snipe found that,

20 BILLS OF BIRDS

if it followed them into marshy lands, it could probe
the soft ground and drag them out of their chambers.
For this operation it has now a bill three inches
long, straight, thin and sensitive at the tip, a beautiful
instrument, but good for no purpose except extract-
ing worms from soft ground. If frost or drought
hardens the ground, the snipe must starve or travel.
Among the many “lang nebbit”’ birds that follow
the same profession as the snipe, some, like the
curlew and the ibis, have curved bills of prodigious
length. I do not know the comparative advantages
of the two forms, but no doubt each bird swears by
its own pattern, as every golfer does by his own
putter.

But now behold another grub-hunter, which,
distasting mud, has discovered an unworked mine
in the trunks of trees. There, in deep burrows,
lurked great succulent bettle-grubs, demanding only
a tool with which they might be dug out. This
has been perfected by many stages, and I have now
before me a splendid specimen of the most improved
pattern—namely, the bill of the great black wood-
pecker of Western India, a bird nearly as big as a
crow. It is nothing else than a hatchet in two
parts, which, when locked together, present a steeled
edge about three-eighths of an inchin breadth. The
hatchet is two and a half inches long by one in
breadth at the base, and a prominent ridge, or keel,
runs down the top from base to point. It is further
strengthened by a keel on each side, Inside of it,

SWALLOWS AND SWIFTS 2

ere the bird became a mummy, was her tongue,
which I myself drew out three inches beyond the
point of the bill. It was rough and tough, like gutta-
percha, tipped with a fine spike, and armed on each
side, for the last inch of its length, with a row of
sharp barbs pointing backwards. The whole was
lubricated with some patent stickfast, ‘always
ready for use.” That grub must sit tight indeed
which this corkscrew will not draw when once the
hatchet has opened a way.

The swallows and swifts, untirable on their wings,
but too gentle to hold their own in a jostling crowd,
soared away after the midges and May-flies and
pestilent gnats that rise from marsh and pond
to hold their joyous dances under the blue dome.
Continually rushing open-mouthed after these, they
have stretched their gape from ear to ear; but their
bills have dwindled by disuse and left only an apology
for their absence.

Compared with all these, the birds that can do
with a diet of fruit only lead an easy life. They
have just to pluck and eat—that is, if they are
pleased with small fruits and content to swallow
them whole. But the hornbills, being too bulky
to hop among twigs, need a long reach; hence
the portentous machines which they carry on their
faces. The beak of a hornbill is nothing else than
a pair of tongs long enough to reach and strong
enough to wrench off a wild fig from its thick stem.
If it were of iron it would be thin and heavy ; being

22 BILLS OF BIRDS

of cellular horn-stuff it is bulky but light. If you
ask why it should rise up into an absurd helmet

ITS BILL DESERVES STUDY

on the queer fowl’s head, I cannot tell. Nature has
quaint ways of using up surplus material.

An easy life begets luxury, and among fruit-eaters
the parrot has become an epicure. It will not

POLLY THE GOURMAND 23

swallow its food whole, and its bill deserves study.
In birds generally the upper mandible is more or
less joined to the skull, leaving only the lower jaw
free to move. But in the parrot the upper mandible
is also hinged, so that each plays freely on the other.
The upper, as we all know, is hooked and pointed ;
the lower has a sharp edge. The tongue is thick,
muscular, and sensitive. The whole makes a won-
derful instrument, unique among birds, for feelingly
manipulating a dainty morsel, shelling, peeling, and
slicing, until nothing is left but the sweetest part
of the core. Of all gourmands Polly is the most
shameless waster.

Long before land, trees, and air had been exploited
the primitive bird must have discovered the harvest
of the waters, and here the competition has been very
keen indeed. Yet the form of bill most in use is
very simple—just a plain pair of forceps, long and
sharp-pointed like scissors. This is evidently hard
to beat, for birds of many sorts use it, handling it
variously. The kingfisher plumps bodily down on
the minnow from an overhanging perch; the solan
goose, soaring, plunges from a “‘ pernicious height ”’ ;
the heron, high on its stilts, darts out a long and
serpentine neck; the diver, with similar beak and
neck, but different legs, pursues the fleeing shoals
under water; to the swift and slippery fish all are
alike terrible in their certainty.

There are, however, other varieties of the fishing
bill. Some have a hook at the point, as that of the

7

24 BILLS OF BIRDS

cormorant, and some are straight at the top, but
curved on the under side. This last form is handy
for storks, which do not pluck fish out of water so
much, but scoop up frogs, crabs, and reptiles from
the ground. The ridiculous bill of the puffin, or
sea-parrot, is an eccentricity. There may be some
idea init, but I suspect it is an effect of vanity merely,
being coloured blue, yellow, and red, and quite in
keeping with the other absurdities of the wearer.
Apart from all these and by itself stands a princely
fisher whose bill is no modification, but an original
invention and a marvellous one. Larger than a
swan and gluttonous withal, the pelican cannot
live on single fishes. It has given up angling alto-
gether and taken to netting ; and the way in which
the net has been constructed out of the pair of
forceps provided in the original plan of its con-
struction is as well worth your examining as any-
thing I know. It is a foot in length, the upper
jaw is flat and broad, while the lower consists of
two thin, elastic bones joined at the point, a mere
ring to carry the curious yellow bag that hangs
from it. In pictures this is represented as a creel
in which the kind pelican carries home the child-
ren’s breakfast ; you are allowed to see the tail of
a big fish hanging out. But it is not a creel; it is
a net. The great birds, marshalled in line on some
broad lake or marsh, and beating the water with
their wings, drive the fish before them until they
have got a dense crowd huddled in panic and con-

‘GaIGNI NAAM ANAA NAAT SVH NOILILAdNWOSD AHL AYXAH

AS WONDERFUL AS THE PELICAN, BUT HOW OPPOSITE |

. 25

26 BILLS OF BIRDS

fusion between them and the shore. Now watch
them narrowly. As each monstrous bill opens, the
thin bones of the lower jaw stretch sideways to the
breadth of a span by some curious mechanism not
described in the books, and at the same time the
shrunken bag expands into a deep, capacious net.
Simultaneously the whole instrument is plunged
into the struggling, silvery mass and comes up full.
The side bones instantly contract again, and the
upper jaw is clapped on them like a lid. No wonder
the fishermen of the East detest the pelican.

In the same marsh, perhaps, standing with un-
equalled grace upon the longest legs known in this
world, is a troop of giant birds as wonderful as the
pelican, but how opposite! The beautiful flamingo
is a bird of feeble intellect, delicate appetite, and
genteel tastes. It cannot eat fish, for its slender
throat would scarcely admit a pea. Besides, the
idea of catching anything, or even picking up food
from the ground, does not occur to its simple mind.
Its diet consists of certain small crustaceans, classed
by naturalists with water-fleas, which abound in
brackish water ; and it has an instrument for taking
these which it knows how to use. I kept flamingos
once, and, after trying many things in vain, offered
them bran, or boiled rice, floating in water. Then
they dined, and I learned the construction and
working of the most marvellous of all bills. The
lower jaw is deep and hollow, and its upper edges
turn in to meet each other, so that you may fairly

THE WONDROUS FLAMINGO 27

describe it as a pipe with a narrow slit along the
upper side. In this pipe lies the tongue, and it
cannot get out, for it is wider than the slit, but it
can be pressed against the top to close the slit,
and then the lower jaw becomes an actual pipe.
The root of the tongue is furnished on both sides
with a loose fringe which we will call the first
strainer. The upper jaw is thin and flat and rests
on the lower like a lid, and it is beautifully fringed
along both sides with small, leathery points, close
set, like the teeth of a very fine saw. This is the
second strainer. To work the machine you dip
the point into dirty water full of water-fleas, draw
back the tip of the tongue a little, and suck in
water till the lower jaw (the pipe) is full, then close
the point again with the tip of the tongue and
force the water out. It can only get out by passing
through the first strainers at the root of the tongue,
then over the palate, and so through the second
strainers at the sides of the bill; and all the solid
matter it contained will remain in the mouth. The
sucking in and squirting out of the water is managed
by the cheeks, or rather by the cheek, for a flamingo
has only one cheek, and that is situated under the
chin. When the bird is feeding you will see this
throbbing faster than the eye can follow it, while
water squirts from the sides of the mouth in a con-
tinuous stream. I should have said that the whole
bill is sharply bent downwards at the middle.
The advantage of this is that when the bird lets

28 BILLS OF BIRDS

down its head into the water, like a bucket into a
well, the point of the bill does not stick in the mud,
but lies flat on it, upside down.

In conclusion, let us not fail to note, whatever
be our political creed, that, while all the birds pursue
their respective industries, there sit apart, in pride
of place, some whose bills are not tools wherewith
to work, but weapons wherewith to slay. And
these take tribute of the rest, not with their consent,
but of right.

III
TAILS

THE secrets of Nature often play like an iridescence
on the surface, and escape the eye of her worshipper
because it is stopped with a microscope. There are
mysteries all about us as omnipresent as the move-
ment of the air that lifts the smoke and stirs the
leaves, which I cannot find that any philosopher has
looked into. Often and deeply have I been im-
pressed with this. For example, there is scarcely,
in this world, a commoner or a humbler thing than
a tail, yet how multifarious is it in aspect, in con-
struction, and in function, a hundred different
things and yet one. Some are of feathers and some
of hair, and some bare and skinny ; some are long
and some are short, some stick up and some hang
down, some wag for ever and some are still; the
uses that they serve cannot be numbered, but one
name covers them all. In the course of evolution
they came in with the fishes and went out with man.
What was their purpose and mission? What place
have they filled in the scheme of things? In short,
what is the true inwardness of a tail ?

If we try to commence—as scientific method

29

30 TAILS

requires—with a definition, we stumble on a key,
at the very threshold, which operis the door. For
there is no definition of a tail; it is not, in its
nature, anything at all. When an animal’s fore-legs
are fitted on to its backbone at the proper dis-
tance from the hind-legs, if any of the backbone
remains over, we call it a tail. But it has no pur-
pose ; it is a mere surplus, which a tailor (the pun
is unavoidable) would have trimmed off. And, lo!
in this very negativeness lies the whole secret of the
multifarious positiveness of tails. For the absence
of special purpose is the chance of general usefulness.
The ear must fulfil its purpose or fail entirely, for it
can do nothing else. Eyes, nose and mouth, hands
and feet, all have their duties; the tail is the un-
employed. And if we allow that life has had any
hand in the shaping of its own destiny, then the
ingenuity of the devices for turning the useless
member to account affords one of the most exhilara-
ting subjects of contemplation in the whole panorama
of Nature. The fishes fitted it up at once as a twin-
propeller, with results so satisfactory that the whale
and the porpoise, coming long after, adopted the
invention. And be it noted that these last and their
kin are now the only ocean-going mammals in the
world. The whole tribe of paddle-steamers, such
as seals and walruses and dugongs, are only coasters.

Among those beasts that would live on the dry
land, the primitive kangaroo could think of nothing
better to do with his tail than to make a stool of it.

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-Udd INd ‘ATIVOIDOIOOZ IANUNINGS AHL AO NOILVIHU UVAN V SI IvVU AHL

KANGAROO, SQUIRREL AND RAT 31

It was a simple thought, but a happy one. Sitting
up like a gentleman, he has his hands free to scratch
his ribs or twitch his moustache. And when he
goes he needs not to put them to the ground, for
his great tail so nearly equals the weight of his
body that one pair of legs keeps the balance even.
And so the kangaroo, almost the lowest of beasts,
comes closer to man in his postures than any other.
The squirrel also sits up and uses his forepaws for
hands, but the squirrel is a sybarite who lies abed
in cold weather, and it is every way characteristic
of him that he has sent his tail to the furrier and
had it done up into a boa, or comforter, at once warm
and becoming. See, too, how daintily he lifts it
over his back to keep it clean. The rat is a-near
relation of the squirrel zoologically, but personally
he is a gutter-snipe, and you may know that by
one look at the tail which he drags after him like a
dirty rope. Others of the same family, cleaner,
though not more ingenious, like the guinea-pig,
have simply dispensed with the encumbrance ;
but the rabbit has kept enough to make a white
cockade, which it hoists when bolting from danger.
This is for the guidance of the youngsters. Nearly
every kind of deer and antelope carries the same
signal, with which, when fleeing through dusky
woods, the leader shows the way to the herd and
the doe to her fawn.

But of beasts that graze and browse, a large
number have turned their tails rather to a use

8

32 TAILS

which throws a pathetic light on misery of which
we have little experience. We do, indeed, growl
at the gnats of a summer evening and think ourselves
very ill-used. How little do we know or think of
the unintermitted and unabated torment that the
most harmless classes of beasts suffer from the
bands of beggars which follow them night and day,
demanding blood, and will take no refusal. Driven
from the brow they settle on the neck, shaken from
the neck they dive between the legs, and but for
that far-reaching whisk at the end of the tail, they
would found a permanent colony on the flanks and
defy ejection, like the raiders of Vatersay. Darwin
argues that the tail-brush may have materially
helped to secure the survival of those species of
beasts that possessed it, and no doubt he is right.

The subject is interminable, but we must give a
passing glance to some quixotic tails. The opossum
scampers up a tree, carrying all her numerous family
on her back, and they do not fall off because each
infant is securely moored by its own tail to the
uplifted tail of its mother. The opossum is a very
primitive beast, and so early and useful an invention
should, one would think, have been spread widely
in after time; but there appears to be some diffi-
culty in developing muscles at the thin end of a
long tail, for the animals that have turned it into
a grasping organ are few and are widely scattered.
Examples are the chameleon among lizards, our
own little harvest mouse, and, pre-eminent above

BEAVER AND FROG 33

all, the American monkeys. To a howler, or spider-
monkey, its long tail is a swing and a trapeze in
its forest gymnasium. Humboldt saw (he says it)
a cluster of them all hanging from a tree by one
tail, which proceeded from a Sandow in the middle.
I should like to see that too. It is worth noting,
by the way, that no old-world monkey has attained
to this application of its tail.

Then there is the beaver, whose tail I am con-
vinced is a trowel. I know of no naturalist who
has mentioned this, but such negative evidence is
of little weight. The beaver, as everybody knows,
is a builder, who cuts down trees and piles log upon
log until he has raised a solid, domed cabin from
seven to twenty feet in diameter, which he then
. plasters over with clay and straw. If he does not
turn round and beat the work smooth with his tail,
then I require to know for what purpose he carries
that broad, heavy, and hard tool behind him.

How few even among lovers of Nature know why
a frog has no tail! The reason is simply that it
used that organ up when it was in want. In early
life, as a jolly tadpole, it had a flourishing tail to
swim with, and gills for breathing water, and an
infantile mouth for taking vegetable nourishment.
But when it began to draw near to frog’s estate,
serious changes were required in its structure to fit
it for the life of a land animal. Four tiny legs
appeared from under its skin, the gills gave place
to air-breathing lungs, and the infant lips to a great,

34 TAILS

gaping mouth. Now, during this “ temporary
alteration of the premises’ all business was of neces-
sity stopped. The half-fish, half-frog could neither
sup like an infant nor eat like a man. In this
extremity it fed on its own tail—absorbed it as a
camel is said to absorb its hump when travelling
in the foodless desert—and so it entered on its new
life without one.

Aeronautics have changed the whole perspective
of life for birds, as they may for us shortly; so it
is no surprise to find that birds have, almost with
one consent, converted their tails into steering-gear.
A commonplace bird, like a sparrow, scarcely
requires this except as a brake when in the act of
alighting ; but to those birds with which flight is
an art and an accomplishment, an expansive forked
or rounded tail (there are two patents) is indispen-
sable. We have shot almost all the birds of this
sort in our own country, and must travel if we would
enjoy that enchanting sight—a pair of eagles or a
party of kites gone aloft for a sail when the wind is
rising, like skaters to a pond when the ice is bearing.
For an hour on end, in restful ease or swift joy,
they trace ever-varying circles and spirals against
the dark storm-cloud, now rising, now falling, turn-
ing and reversing, but never once flapping their
widespread pinions.

How is it done? How does the Shamrock sail ?
Watch, and you will see. When the wind is behind,
each stiff quill at the end of the wing stands out by

BIRDS’ TAILS 35

itself and is caught and driven by the blast; but
as the bird turns round to face the gale, they all
close up and form a continuous mainsail, close-
hauled. And all the while the expanded tail is in
play, dipping first at one side and then at the other,
and turning the trim craft with easy grace “as the
governor listeth.”

Besides ground birds, like the quail, there are

THERE ARE SOME ECCENTRICS, SUCH AS JENNY WREN, WHICH
HAVE DESPISED THEIR TAILS.

some eccentrics, such as Jenny wren, which have
despised their tails, and there are specialists also
which require them for other purposes than flying.
The woodpecker’s tail is quite useless as a rudder,
for he is a woodman and has altered and adapted
it for a portable stool to rest against as he plies his
axe.

But that man must be very blind to the place
which birds have taken in the progress of civilisa-

36 TAILS

tion who can suppose it possible that they should
think only of utility in such a question as the
disposal of their tails. It is a common notion among
those who have acquired some smattering of the
theory of evolution that fishes developed into reptiles,
reptiles into birds, and birds into beasts; but this
is as wrong as it could be. Whatever the genealogy
of the beasts may be, they certainly were not evolved
from birds, and are in many respects not above
them but below them. These are two independent
branches of the tree of living forms, as the Greeks
and Romans were branches of the stock of Japheth.
The beasts may stand for the conquering Romans if
you like, but the birds are the Greeks, and have
advanced far beyond them in all emotional and
artistic sensibility. They worship in the temple of
music and beauty. And, like ourselves, they have
found no subject so worthy of the highest efforts
of art as their own dress. But the clothing of the
body must conform more or less to the figure, and
so, for a field in which invention and fancy may
sport untrammelled, a lady turns to her hat and a
bird to its tail, And by both, with equal heroism,
every consideration of mere comfort, convenience,
health, or safety is swept aside in obedience to the
higher aim. Is this only a flippant jocularity, or
is there here in very truth some profound law of
the mind revealing itself in spheres seemingly so
disconnected ? :

Look at a peacock. Its train, by the way, is a

THE PEACOCK 37

false tail, like the chignon of twenty years ago, or
the fringe of the present day ; the true tail is under
it, and serves no purpose but to support it. Now
the peacock lives on the ground, among scrub and
brushwood, haunted by jackals and wild cats. They,
like soldiers in khaki, reconnoitre him in a uniform
expressly designed to elude the eye, but he flaunts
a flag resplendent with green and gold. And when
his one chance of life lies in springing nimbly from
the ground and committing himself to his strong
wings, he must lift and carry this ponderous para-
phernalia with him. And the terrible Bonelli’s
eagle is soaring above. But all is risked proudly
for the sake of the morning hour in the glade where
the ladies assemble. And the peacock is only one
of many. Not to mention the lyre bird, the Argus
pheasant, the bird of paradise, and other splendid
examples, there are common dicky-birds which point
the moral and adorn the tail as emphatically.

If the tail is a rudder, where should you look to
find it in its most simple and efficient form but
among the flycatchers, which make their living by
aerial acrobatics after flies? Yet this family seems
to be peculiarly prone to the vanity of a stylish tail.
The paradise flycatcher flutters two streamers a foot
long, like white ribbons, behind it. The fantail
could hide behind its own fan. The bee-eater has
the two central feathers prolonged and pointed.
The drongos, which are flycatchers in habit, wear
their tails very long and deeply forked ; and one of

38 TAILS

them, the racket-tailed drongo, has the two side
feathers extended beyond the rest for nearly a foot,
and as thin as wires, expanding into a blade at the
ends. I have seen nothing in ladies’ hats more
preposterous. It is vain to object that there can
be no proper comparison between tails and hats
because the woman chooses her own hat while the
bird has to wear what Nature has givenit. I know
that, but the contention is utterly superficial. What
choice has a woman as to the style of her hat?
Fashion prescribes for her, and Nature for the birds ;
that is all the difference. No doubt she acquiesces
when theoretically she might rebel. The bird cannot
rebel, but does it not acquiesce? Does a lyre bird
submit to its tail—wear it under protest, so to speak ?
Believe me, every bird that has an esthetic tail
knows the fact, and tries to live up to it. We may
push the argument even further, for the motmot
of Brazil is not content with a ready-made tail, but
actually strips the web off the two long side feathers
with its own beak, except a little patch at the end,
so as to get the pattern which Nature, if one must
use the phrase, gave to the racket-tailed drongo.
A specimen is exhibited in the hall of the South
Kensington Museum.

In this connection I may also say that the shape
or colour of a tail is not everything. An observant
eye may find much to note in the wearing of them.
There is a stylish way of carrying a tail and a
slovenly way, and there are coquettish arts for the

‘sSaud ONINMTIVM V
SUVAM UFHLO AHL ATIHM ‘SLUINS SLI SIAII ANO AHI—DONITUVIS V GNV GUYIGNOVId V

THE VEHICLE OF EMOTION 39

display of recherché tails. A blackbird and a
starling are both tidy birds, and both walk much
on the ground, but the one lifts its skirts, while the
other, more practical and less fashionable, wears a
walking dress and saves itself trouble.

This line of observation leads to a higher, and
reveals the most important purpose that tails have
served in the economy of beast, bird, and reptile,
and, perhaps, even cold-blooded fish. Before the
godlike countenance of man appeared on the earth,
with its contractile forehead and erectile eyebrows,
the answering light of the eye, the expansive nostrils,
and subtilely mobile lips; before that the tail was
the prime vehicle of emotion and safety-valve of
passion. It is a great truth, too often buried in
these days under rubbish of materialistic theories,
that some way of self-manifestation is a supreme
.. necessity of all sentient life. From the hot centre
of thought and feeling the currents rush along the
nervous ways and pervade the whole frame, seeking
an outlet. But many passages are barred by duty,
or fear, or eager purpose. A strong gust of passion
may burst all barriers and force its way out at every
point, but gentle currents flow along the lines of
least resistance and find the idle tail. I do not
know a better illustration of this than a cat watching
a mouse. The ears are pricked forward, the eyes
are fixed on the unsuspecting victim, every muscle
of the legs is tense, like a bent bow ready to speed
the arrow on its way. But see, the excitement

9

40 TAILS

with which the whole body is charged cannot be
wholly restrained, and oozes out at the point of the
tail.

Every emotion and passion takes this course.
The happy kid wags its tail as it runs to its mother,
the donkey when it has executed a successful bray,
and the dog when it sees its master. At the sight
of a rival the dog holds its tail up stiffly, unless,

AT THE SIGHT OF A RIVAL THE DOG HOLDS ITS TAIL UP STIFFLY

indeed, the rival is a bigger dog than itself, in which
case the index goes down quickly between the legs.
An elated horse elevates its tail, and so does a duck
in the same mood. A lizard preparing to fight
another lizard

Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail,

and the raging lion of fiction lashes its sides with
the same nervous instrument.
It would be tedious to dwell on the pretty part

NERVES AND THE TAIL 41

which the tail plays in the courtships of sparrows
and pigeons, or on the sprightly attitudes by which
birds of all sorts let off their spirits when shower
and sunshine have overfilled their hearts with glad-
ness. But birds twitch their tails constantly, with-
out meaning anything by it. The ceaseless wagging
of a wagtail is a mere habit of cheerfulness, like the
twirling of her thumbs by an idle Scotswoman.
The long tail is there and something must be done
with it. Look at the embarrassment which a nervous
young man shows about the disposal of his hands ;
how he thrusts them into his trouser pockets, hangs
them by their thumbs from the arm-holes of his
waistcoat, or gives them a walking-stick to play with.
I like to imagine what such a fellow would do with
a long tail if he had it—how he would wind it round
each leg in turn, rub up his back hair, and describe
figures on the floor. But no animal so self-conscious
as man could bear up long under the nervous strain
of having to think continually of its tail. It would
die young and the race would become extinct.
Perhaps it did.

A final word on the conclusion of the whole matter,
for these reflections have a moral. As habit becomes
character, so expression hardens into feature. The
tail of a sheep grows downwards, but that of a goat
upwards, and this is the only infallible outward mark
of distinction between the two animals. But it
is the permanent record of a long history. The sheep
was never anything but sheepish ; the goat and its

42 TAILS

forefathers were pert as kids and insolent when their
beards grew. It is useless to inquire why insolence
should express itself by an upturned tail until
someone can advance a reason why it should express
itself in another way.

For proof of the fact you need go no farther than
your own dogs. The ancestral wolf, or jackal, hunt-
ing and fighting, fearing and hoping, showed every
changing mood by the pose of its tail ; but a change
came when it acquired an assured position of security
and importance as the chosen companion of man, so
dreaded by all its kith and kin. The tail went up
at once and stayed there; when it could go no
higher, it curled over. But promotion breeds conceit
only in base natures. The greyhound is a gentle-
man, respectful and self-respecting, and it shows
that by the very carriage of its tail. Only a snob
at heart, petted and pampered for many generations,
could have produced that perfect incarnation of
smug self-satisfaction, the pug. Let us take the
lesson home. The thoughts on which we let our
minds dwell, and the sentiments that we harbour in
our hearts, are the chisels with which we are carving
out our faces and those of our children’s children.

IV
NOSES

SOME may think that I have chosen a trivial subject,
and they will look for frivolous treatment of it.
I can only hope that they will be disappointed.
There is nothing that the progress of science has
taught us more emphatically than this—that we
must call nothing insignificant. Seemingly trivial
pursuits have led to discoveries which have benefited
all mankind, and priceless truths have been dug
out of the most unpromising mines. I am not
insinuating that anyone’s nose is an unpromising
mine, but I say that I am persuaded there is wisdom
hidden in that organ for him who will observingly
distil it out.

It possesses a peculiar and mystical significance
not shared by any other feature. This is abund-
antly proved by common speech, which is one of
the most trustworthy of all kinds of evidence. For
example, we speak of a person turning up his nose
at a good offer. The phrase is absurd, for the power
of turning up his nose is one which no human being
ever possessed. A shrew can do it, but not a man.
Yet the meaning of the saying needs no interpreta-

43

44

WHAT IS A NOSE? 48

tion. Akin to it is the classical phrase, adunco
suspendere naso. What Horace means scarcely re-
quires explanation, but no commentator has success-
fully explained it. These expressions well illustrate
the mystery that enshrouds our most salient feature.
They show that, while everybody can see that dis-
dain is expressed through the nose, nobody can define
how it is done. Then there is that curious expres-
sion “put his nose out of joint,’ which is quite
inexplicable, the nose being destitute of joint. There
are many other phrases and also gestures which
point in the same direction, but need not be cited,
being for the most part vulgar. Allusions to the
nose have a tendency to be vulgar, which is another
mystery inciting us to investigate it. So let us
proceed.

The first thing required by the principles of
scientific precedure is a definition. What is a nose?
But this proves to be a much more difficult question
than anyone would suspect before he tried to answer
it. The individual human nose we can recognise,
describe or sketch more easily than any other feature,
but try to define the thing nose in Nature and it
is a most elusive phenomenon. When we speak
of a man being led by the nose we imply that it is
a part of him which is prominent and situated in
front, when we speak of keeping one’s nose above
water we refer to it as the breathing orifice, but
when we say that this or that offends our nose we
are regarding it as the seat of the sense of smell.

46 NOSES

I believe that all these three ideas must be included
in any definition. It should follow that insects,
which breathe through holes in their sides, cannot
have noses, and this is the truth.

Fishes, too, though they may have snouts, have
not noses, because they breathe by gills. In truth,
it seems that the nose was a very late and high
acquisition, almost the finishing touch of the perfected
animal form. And incidentally this leads us to notice
what a great step was taken in evolution when the
breathing holes were brought up to the region of
the mouth. For the sense of taste is necessarily
situated in the mouth, and the sense of smell is in
close alliance with it. The mouth tastes food dis-
solved in the saliva during the process of masti-
cation, and the primary use of the sense of smell
is to detect and analyse beforehand the small par-
ticles given off by food and floating in the atmosphere.

A good many years ago, when the late Sally
chimpanzee was the darling of the Zoological Gardens
in Regent’s Park, I watched her eating dates. She
was an epicure, and always peeled each date deli-
cately with her preposterous lips before eating it,
and during the process she would apply the date
to her nose every second to test its quality or enjoy
its aroma. The action was indescribably comical,
but what would it have been if her nostrils had
been situated among her ribs? Imagine a mantis,
for example, as he chews up a fly, lifting one of his
wings and applying it to his flanks to see if it smells

HEADQUARTERS OF INTELLIGENCE 47

gamey. That is where some naturalists believe
that the sense of smell is situated in insects. Others,
however, think, with reason, that it is in the antennz
or mouth. Nobody knows; the senses of the lower
animals seem to be stuck about all parts of the body.

But, even if the sense of smell is at the mouth,
how limited must its usefulness be when it can only
deal with substances that are held to it! Anewera
dawned when the passages by which the breath of
life unceasingly comes and goes were transferred to
the region of the mouth also. The nerves of smell
quickly spread themselves over the lining membrane
of those passages and became warders of the gate,
challenging every waft of air that entered the body
and examining what it carried. Thenceforth this
region comprising the mouth, nostrils and surround-
ing parts holds a new and high place in the economy
of the body, for the headquarters of the intelligence
department are located there, and all the faculties
of the brain converge on that point. Of course,
the eyes and ears claim a share, but they are not far
off.

Now it is being recognised more and more clearly
by medical and physiological science that when
the mind is much directed to any part of the body
it exercises an influence in some way not under-
stood on the flow of blood to that part to a degree
which may seriously affect its functions and even
its growth. When a person is suffering from any
nervous affection, from heart disease, or even from

10

48 NOSES

weakness of the eyes, it is of the utmost importance
to keep him from knowing it if possible, for if he
knows it he will think about it, and that will inevitably
aggravate it. This principle is well recognised in
systems of physical culture. And surely it is impos-
sible that so much intelligence should pass through
that one sensitive region of the body which we are
considering without affecting its growth and struc-
ture. Every muscle in it becomes quick to respond
to various sensations in different ways, till the very
recollection of those sensations will excite the same
response.

Nay, we may go further. The mental emotions
excited by those sensations will be expressed in
the same way. For example, the sense of smell is
peculiarly effective in exciting disgust. Anything
which does violence to the sense of hearing exas-
perates, but does not disgust. If a man practises
the accordion all day in the next room you do not
loathe him, you only want to kill him. But any-
thing that stinks excites pure disgust. Here you
have the key to the fact that disgust and all feelings
akin to it, disdain, contempt and scorn, express
themselves through the nose. Darwin says that
when we think of anything base or vile in a man’s
character the expression of the face is the same “ as
if we smelled a bad smell.” This is an example of
the temporary expression of a passing emotion, and
there are many others like it. But each of us has
his prevailing and dominant emotions which con-

THE NOSTRILS OF THE APTERYX ARE AT THE TIP OF ITS BEAK,

48)

EVOLUTION OF THE NOSE 49

stitute the habitual attitude of his mind. And by
the habitual indulgence of any emotion the features
will become habituated to the expression of it, and
so the set of our features comes at last to express
our prevailing and dominant emotions; in other
words, our character.

But let us return to the evolution of the nose. In
these days of universal ‘‘ Nature study” nobody
need be told that the practice of breathing through
the nostrils was introduced by the amphibians and
reptiles. The former (frogs and toads) take to it
only when they come of age, but lizards, snakes
and all other reptiles do it from infancy. But
the nose is not yet. That is something too delicate
to come out of a cold-blooded snout covered with
hard scales. Birds, too, by having their mouth
parts encased in a horny bill seem to be debarred
from wearing noses. And yet there is one primeval
fowl, most ancient of all the feathered families,
which has come near it. I mean the apteryx, that
eccentric, wingless recluse which hides itself in the
scrub jungles of New Zealand. Its nostrils, unlike
those of every other bird, are at the tip of its beak,
which is swollen and sensitive ; and Dr. Buller says
that as it wanders about in the night it makes a
continual sniffing and softly taps the walls of its
cage with the point of its bill. But the apteryx is
one of those odd geniuses which come into the
world too soon, and perish ineffectual. Its kindred
are all extinct, and so will it be ere long.

50 NOSES

When we come to the beasts we find the right
conditions at last for the growth of the nose. Take
the horse for an example of the average beast
without idiosyncrasy. Its profile is nearly a straight

ALAS

A BOLD ATTEMPT TO GROW IN THE CASE OF A TAPIR

line from the crown to the nostrils, beyond which it
slopes downwards to the lips. The skin of this
part is soft and smooth, without hair, and the horse
dearly loves to have it fondled. The sense of touch

TAPIR, CAMEL, AND BAT 51

is evidently uppermost. At this stage there was
what to the eye of fancy looks like a bold attempt
to grow a nose in the case of a tapir, but it mis-
carried. These hoofed beasts are all very hard up
for something in the way of a hand to bring their
food to their mouths. The camel employs its lips
and the cow its tongue; the muntjae or barking
deer of India has attained a tongue of such length
that it uses it for a handkerchief to wipe its eyes.
So the tapir could not resist the temptation to mis-
apply its nose to the purpose of gathering fodder,
and the ultimate result was the elephant, whose
nose is a wonderful hand and a bucket and other
things. The pig, being a swine, debased its nose
in a worse way, making a grubbing tool of it.

There has been another attempt to misuse and
pervert this part of the face which I scarcely dare
to touch upon, for it is so utterly fantastic and
mystical that I fear the charge of heresy if I give
words to my thoughts. It occurs among bats, a
tribe of obscure creatures about which common
knowledge amounts to this, that they fly about
after sunset, are uncanny, and fond of getting
entangled in the hair of ladies, and should be killed.
But there are certain families of bats, named horse-
shoe bats, leaf-nosed bats and vampires about which
common knowledge is mil, and the knowledge pos-
sessed by naturalists very little, so I will tell what
I know of them. They are larger than common
bats, their wings are broad, soft and silent, like

52 NOSES

those of the owl, they sleep in caves, tombs and
ruins, they do not flutter in the open air, but swiftly
traverse gloomy avenues and shady glades, their
prey is not gnats and midges, but the “ droning
beetle,’ the death’s head moth, the cockchafer,
croaking frogs, sleeping birds and human blood.
The books will tell you that these bats are distin-
guished by “complicated nasal appendages con-
sisting of foliaceous skin processes around the
nostrils,” which is quite true and utterly futile.
It may do for a dried skin or a specimen in spirits
of wine. I have had the foul fiend in a cage and
looked him in the face. His whole countenance,
from lips to brow and from cheek to cheek, is covered
and hidden by a hideous design of

Spells and signs,
Symbolic letters, circles, lines,

sculptured in living, quivering skin. It is a sight
to make the flesh creep. The books suggest that
these foliaceous appendages are the organs of some
special sense akin to touch. Futile again! There
are things in Nature still which prompt the naturalist
who has not atrophied his inner eye and starved
his imagination to cry out:

Science...
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities ?

Supposing there should be in the unseen universe

“THIS IS THE NOSE” 53

an evil spirit, an imp of malice and mischief, not
Milton’s Satan, but the Deil of Burns:

Whyles ranging, like a roaring lion,

For prey, a’ holes an’ corners tryin ;
Whyles on the strong-winged tempest flyin,
Tirlin the kirks ;

Whyles in the human bosom pryin,

and supposing him to crave possession of a body
through which he might get into touch with this
material world and express himself in outward
forms and motions; then oh! how fitly were this
bat explained.

But let us go back to firm ground. If you com-
pare a dog’s profile with that of a horse you will
note at once that the nostrils are in advance of the
lips, and have a kind of portal to themselves. This
is a distinct advance. The sense of smell has come
to the front and pushed aside the lower sense of
touch. You will observe, too, that with the growth
of the brain the brain-pan has elevated itself above
the level of the nose. Through the cat to the
monkeys the process proceeds, the forehead advanc-
ing, the jaws retreating, and the nostrils leaving the
lips, until they finally settle in a detached villa midway
between the eyes and the mouth. This is the nose.
I do not know the use of it. I cannot fathom the
meaning of it. It is a solemn mystery. See the
face of an orang-outang. It is a countenance, a sign-
board with three distinct lines of writing on it, the
eyes, the nose and the mouth. You may not think

54 NOSES

much of this particular nose. Neither do I. I
think it is situated rather too near the eyes and too
far from the mouth. It is a
little too small also, and wants
style. But you must not judge
a first attempt too critically.
I have seen human noses of a
pattern not unlike this, but
they are not considered aristo-
cratic: perhaps they indicate a
reversion to the ancestral type.
But the noses even of
monkeys are not all like this.
P Have seen ame woses I fact, there is a, good deal
OF A PATTERN NOT UN- of variety, and two in particular
LIKE THIS, BUT THEY e
ARE Not consiperED have struck me as quite re-
irene agers markable. One is that of the
long-nosed monkey (Semnopithecus nasalis). I think
it must have suggested Sterne’s stranger on a mule,
who had travelled to the promontory of noses and
threw all Strassburg into a ferment. I have often
contemplated this nose in mute wonderment, and
longed to see that monkey in life, if so be I
might arrive at some understanding of it; for the
taxidermist cannot rise above his own level, and
the man who would mount S. nasalis would need to
be a Henry Irving. Then there is the sub-nosed
monkey, labelled rhinopithecus, of which there is
an expressive specimen at the South Kensington
Museum. Who canconsider that nose seriously and

So
ened ell

THE LONG-NOSED MONKEY,
54]

THE HUMAN NOSE 55

continue to believe in a recipe made up of struggle
for existence, adaptation to environment, and natural
selection quantum suf.? If I
could dine with that monkey,
ask it to drink a glass of wine
with me, offer it a pinch of snuff
and so on, I might come in time
to feel, if not to comprehend,
the import of its nose.

But one step further is required
for the evolution of what we may
call the human nose, and that is
a solid foundation, a ridge of
bone connecting it with the brow
and separating the eyes from
each other. I believe that the “"°C8h cOvousiy?
completeness of this is a fair
index of the comparative advancement of different
races of men. In the Greek ideal of a perfect face
the profile forms a straight line from the top of the
forehead to the tip of the nose. This.is the type of
face which painters have delighted to give to the
Virgin Mary ; and, when looking at their Madonnas,
one cannot help wondering whether they forgot that
Mary was a Jewess. According to the Hebrew ideal,
a perfect nose was like ‘‘ the tower of Lebanon which
looketh toward Damascus’ (Song of ‘Solomon, vii.
4); but not even the ruins of that tower remain to
help us to-day. The Romans, no doubt, accepted
‘the ideal of the Greeks esthetically, but their destiny

It

56 NOSES

had given them a very different nose, and they ruled
the world.

Here is the nose of Julius Cesar as a coin has pre-
served it for us. I think that the outline is too
straight for a typical Roman, but the deep dip under
the brow and the downward point are characteristic.
Now compare the nose of another race which rules
an empire greater than that of the Caesars. Here
is John Bull as Punch usually represents him. It
belongs to the same genus as that of the Roman.
The reason why this should be the nose of command
is not easy to give with scientific precision, for we
are dealing with the play of very subtle influences,
so the man without imagination will no doubt scoff.
But I will take shelter under Darwin. Dealing with
the expression of pride he says, “A proud man
exhibits his sense of superiority by holding his head
and body erect. He is haughty (haut), or high,
and makes himself appear as large as possible.”
Again, “ The arrogant man looks down on others ”’ ;
and yet again, “In some photographs of patients
affected by a monomania of pride, sent me by Dr.
Crichton-Browne, the head and body were held erect
and the mouth firmly closed, This latter action,
expressive of decision, follows, I presume, from the
proud man feeling perfect self-confidence in himself.”

Darwin says nothing about the nose, but I believe
that, by physiological sympathy, it cannot but take
part in the habitual downward look upon inferior
beings. Darwin goes on to say that, ‘‘ The whole

IMMOBILITY 57

expression of pride stands in direct antithesis to that
of humility” ; from which it follows, if my philo-
sophy is sound, that the nose of Uriah Heep was
turned upwards.

Of course, many emotions may share in the
moulding of a nose, and the whole subject is too
intricate and vast to be treated briefly. I have only
given a few examples to illustrate my argument, and
my conclusion is that the key to the peculiar signific-
ance and personal quality of the nose is to be found
in its immobility. The eyes and lips are incessantly
in motion, we can twitch and wrinkle the cheeks
and forehead, and muscles to move the ears are there,
though most men have lost control of them. But
the nose stands out like some bold promontory on a
level coast, or like the Sphinx in the Egyptian desert,
with an ancient history, no doubt, and a mystery
perhaps, but without response to any appeal. And
for this very reason it is an index, not to that which is
transient in the man, but to that which is permanent.
He may knit his brows to seem thoughtful and pro-
found, or compress his lips to persuade his friends
and himself that he has a strong will, but he can play
no trick with his nose. There it stands, an incor-
ruptible witness, testifying to what he is, and not
only to what he is, but to the rock whence he was
hewn and to the pit whence he was digged. For his
nose is a bequest from his ancestors, an entailed
estate which he cannot alienate.

Vv
EARS

MEN and women have ears, and so have jugs and
pitchers. In the latter case they are useful: jugs
and pitchers are lifted by them. And what is useful
is fit, and fitness is the first condition of beauty.
But human ears are put to no use, except sometimes
when naughty little boys are lifted by them in the
way of discipline ; and I can see no beauty in them.
It is only because they are so common that we do
not notice how ridiculous they are. In the days of
Charles I. men sometimes had their ears cut off for
holding wrong opinions, which would have made
them famous and popular in these enlightened days,
but at that time it made all right-thinking people
despise them, so the fashion of going without ears
did not spread among us. If it had, then how
differently we should all think of the matter now!
If we were all accustomed to neat, round heads at
drawing-rooms, levees and balls, how repulsive it
would be to see a well-dressed man with two ridiculous,
wrinkled appendages sticking out from the sides of
his face!

In saying this I am not drawing on my fancy,
58

PEGS FOR ORNAMENTS 59

but on my memory. I can recollect the time when
no gentleman, still less any lady, would have owned
a terrier with its ears on. And why go back so
far? The same sentiment is prevalent in good
society with respect to men’s beards in this year of
grace and smooth faces. Yet, if one chance to be
looking at a Rembrandt instead of at society, what
an infinitely handsomer adjunct to a noble face is
a fine beard than a pair of ears!

When woman first looked at her face in a polished
saucepan, she was at once struck with the comi-
cality of those things, and bethought herself what
to do with them. She decided to use them for pegs
to hang ornaments on. The improvement excited
the admiration of her husband and the envy of her
rivals to such a degree that all other women of taste
in her tribe did the same, and from that day to this,
in almost every country in the world, it has been
accounted a shame for any respectable woman to
show her face in public in the hideousness of naked
ears. This discovery of its capabilities gave a new
value to the ear, and a large, roomy one became an
asset in the marriage market. I have seen a pretty
little damsel of Sind with fourteen jingling silver
things hanging at regular intervals from the outside
edge of each ear. If Nature had been niggardly,
the lobe at least could be enlarged by boring it and
thrusting in a small wooden peg, then a larger one,
and so on until it could hold an ivory wheel as large
as a quoit, and hung down to the shoulders.

60 EARS

But Nature surely did not intend the ear for this
purpose. Then what did she intend? A popular
error is that the ears are given to hear with, but the
ears cannot hear. The hearing is done by a box
of assorted instruments (malleus, incus, stapes, etc.)
hidden in a burrow which has its entrance inside
of the ear. If you argue that the ears are intended
to catch sounds and direct them down to the hearing
instrument, then explain their absurd shape. They
are useless. A man who wants to hear distinctly
puts his hand to his ear. And why do they not
turn to meet the sounds that come from different
quarters? They are absolutely immovable, and
therefore also expressionless. A savage expresses
his mind with all the rest of his face; he smiles and
grins and pouts and frowns, but his ears stand like
gravestones with the inscriptions effaced. How
different is the case when you turn from man to the
“irrational”? animals! The eyes of a fawn are
lustrous and beautiful, but they would be as mean-
ingless as polished stones without the eloquent ears
that stand behind them and tell her thoughts.
Curiosity, suspicion, alarm, anger, submission,
friendliness, every emotion that flits across her
quick, sensitive mind speaks through them. They
are in touch with her soul, and half the music of
her life is played on them. And if you abstract
yourself from individuals and look at that thing, the
ear, in the wide field of life, what a great, living
reality it is!—a spiritual unity under infinite diver-

EARS FOR BEASTS ONLY 61

sity of material form and fashion. It is like the
telegraph wire overhead, the commonest and plainest
of material things, but charged with the silent and
invisible currents of the life of the world.

‘‘ Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery
explore.”

Birds have no ears, nor have crocodiles, nor
frogs, nor
snakes.
Ears seem
to be for
beasts only.
And not
for all
beasts.
Seals are
divided by
naturalists
into two
great fami-
lies — those ——=_
with ears, ———————
and those =

1 OR PERHAPS WHEN IT WANTS TO LISTEN IT RAISES
wi t h ou t 7 A FLIPPER TO ITS EAR,

¢

The com-

mon seal belongs to the latter class, and the sea-
lion to the former. A common seal lives in the sea,
and when it does wriggle up on the beach of an
iceberg there is nothing to hear, I suppose, or
perhaps when it wants to listen it raises a flipper

62 EARS

to its ear. I never saw one doing so, but we do
not see everything that happens in the world.
The sea-lion, with its stouter limbs, can lift its
forepart, raise its head and look about it, and
even flop about the ice-fields at a respectable
rate. And there is no doubt that one of these
is as much above an earless seal as fifty years of
Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay. When
performing seals are exhibited at a circus sitting on
chairs, catching balls on the points of their noses
and playing diabolo with them, or balancing billiard
cues on their snouts, and doing other miraculous
things, they are always sea-lions, not common seals.
Of course, I do not mean to insinuate that sea-lions
invented the ear and stuck it on: that would be
unscientific ; but I mean that their general intelli-
gence and interest in affairs created that demand
for more distinct hearing which led to the develop-
ment of an ear trumpet. This view is wholly
scientific, though pedants may quarrel with my way
of putting it.

The sea-lion’s ears are very minute, mere apologies
one might think; but don’t be hasty. The finny
prey of the sea-lion makes no sound as it skims
through the water; and perhaps the padded foot
of that stealthy garrotter, the Polar bear, makes
as little on the smooth ice; for catching the one
and not being caught by the other the sea-lion must
trust to the keenness of its great goggle eyes. But
it is a social beast, and it wants to catch the bellow-

MANY VARIATIONS 63

ing of its fellows far across the foggy waste of
ice-floes; and that little leather scoop standing
behind the ear-hole seems to be just the instrument
required to catch and send down those sounds which
would otherwise glance off the glossy fur and never
find entrance to the tiny orifice at all. If it were
any larger than is absolutely necessary it would be
a serious impediment to a professional diver and
swimmer like the sea-lion. This is the reason why
otters have very small ears, and why whales and
porpoises have none at all.

But when a beast lives on land the conditions are
all altered, and then the ear blossoms out into an
infinite variety of forms and sizes, from each of
which the true naturalist may divine the manner
of life of its wearer as surely as the palmist tells
your past, present and future from the lines on your
hand. First, he will divide all beasts into those
that pursue and those that flee, oppressors and
oppressed. The former point their ears forwards,
but the latter backwards. There may be a good
deal of free play in both cases, but I am thinking
of the habitual position. When a cat is making
its felonious way along the garden wall, wrapped in
thoughts of blackbirds and thrushes, its ears look
straight forwards, and this is the way in which a cat’s
portrait is always taken, because it is characteristic.
It cannot turn them round to catch sounds from
behind, and would scorn to do so; when accosted
from behind, it turns its head and looks danger in

12

64 EARS

the face. It can fold them down backwards when
the danger is a terrier and the decks are cleared for
action, but that is another story. Contrast Brer
Rabbit as he comes “lopin’ up de big road.”’ His
ears are turning every way scouting for danger, not
always in unison, but independently ; but when he
is at rest they are set to alarm
from the flank and rear.

But when he “tear out the
house like the dogs wuz atter

TaN him,” then they point straight
an mm back. He was made to be
: )

eaten, and he knows it. So it

we Zz is with the whole tribe of deer,

MD § Pe "h and even with the horse, pam-
ees Ye pered and cared for and un-
at acquainted with danger ; his
fees ears are a weathercock regis-

“rar our tHE Housriixe tering the drift of all his petty
woos W02 ATTER hopes and fears. I see the
left ear go forward and prepare
for a desperate shy at that wheelbarrow. He knows
a wheelbarrow familiarly—there is one in his stall
all day—but I am taking him a road he does not
want to go, and so the hypocrite is going to pretend
that barrow is ofadangerous sort. I prepare to apply
a counter-irritant : he sees it with the corner of his
eye, and both ears turn back like a tuning-fork.
The size and quality of the ear serve to show
how far the owner depends on it. You will never

EARS AND EYES 65

begin to understand Nature until you see clearly
that every life is dominated by two supreme anxieties
which push aside all other concerns—viz., to eat,
and not to be eaten. The one is uppermost in those
that pursue, and the other in those that flee. Now
if the pursuer fails he loses a dinner, but if the
fugitive fails he loses his life, from which it follows
that the very best sort of ears will be found among
those beasts that do not ravage but run.

But there is another matter to be taken into
account. The ears are not the whole of the beast’s
outfit. It has eyes, andit hasanose. Which of the
three it most relies on depends upon the manner of
its life. A bird lives in trees or the air, looking
down at the prowling cat or up at the hawk hovering
in the clear sky ; so it does not keep ears, and its nose
is of no account. But what four-footed thing can
see like a bird? The squirrel also lives in the trees,
and its ears are frivolously decorated with tufts of
hair. You will not find many beasts that can afford
to prostitute their ears to ornamental purposes.
The only other beast that I can think of at this
moment which has tufted ears is the lynx. Now
the lynx is a tree cat, and there is proverbial wisdom
in the saying “ Eyes like a lynx.”

But go to the timid beasts that spend their lives
on the ground among grass and brushwood and woods
and coppices, where murderous foes are prowling
unseen, and you will see ears indeed—expansive,
tremulous, turning lightly on well-oiled pivots, and

66 EARS

catching, like large sea-shells, the mingled murmur
of rustling leaves and snapping twigs and chirping
insects and falling seeds, and the slight, occasional,

A GREAT CATHOLIC CONGRESS OF DISTINGUISHED EARS.

abrupt, fateful sound which is none of these. It is
impossible, no doubt, for us ever to think ourselves
into the life which these beasts live—moving, think-
ing and sleeping in a circumambient atmosphere

A CONGRESS OF EARS 67

of never-ceasing sound; sitting, as it were, at the
receiving station of a system of wireless telegraphy,
and catching cross-currents of floating intelligence
from all quarters, mostly undiscernible by us if we
listened for it, but which they, by long practice,
instantly locate and interpret without conscious
effort.

The zoologist classifies them under many heads.
The field mouse and rabbits are rodentia, the deer
ungulata, the kangaroos marsupialia. In my
museum they are all one family, and their labels are
their ears. In these days of international confer-
ences, parliaments of religion, pan-everything-in-
turn councils, might we not arrange for a great
catholic congress of distinguished ears? What a
glow of new life it would shed upon our straitened,
traditional ways of thinking about the social prob-
lems of our humble fellow-creatures! I would exclude
the eared owls, whose ears are a mere sport of
fashion, like the hideous imitations of birds’ wings
which ladies stick on their hats.

But just when this peep into the rare show of
Nature is lifting my soul into sublimity, I am brought
down to the base earth again by an exception.
This is the plague of all high science. You design a
stately theory, collect from many quarters a wealth
of facts to establish it with, and have arranged them
with cumulative and irresistible force, when some
disgusting, uninvited case thrusts itself in on your
notice and refuses to fit into your argument at all.

68 EARS

In this instance it is “‘ my lord the elephant.” That
he has no need to concern himself about any blood-
thirsty beast that may be lurking in the jungle is
not more obvious than that his ears are the biggest
in the world. Now there are two ways of getting
rid of an obstruction of this kind. One is to betake
yourself to your thinking chair and pipe and to rake
up the possibilities of the Pleiocene and Meiocene
ages, and prove that when the immense ear of the
elephant was evolved there must have been some
carnivorous monster, some sabre-toothed tiger or
cave bear, which preyed on elephants.

The other way is to get acquainted with the
elephant, cultivate an intimacy with him, and find
out what his ears are to him. I prefer the second
way. I would patiently watch him as he stands
drowsily under an umbrageous banian tree on a
sultry day before the monsoon has burst and re-
freshed earth and air. So might I note that his ears
are incessantly moving, but not turning this way and
that to catch sounds—just flapping, flapping, as if
to cool his great temples. So have I seen the
gigantic fruit bats, called flying foxes in India,
hanging in hundreds in the upper branches of a tall
peepul tree at noon, feeling too hot to sleep, and all
fanning themselves in unison with one wing—a
comic spectacle. And at each flap of the elephant’s
ears I would observe that a cloud of flies (for the
elephant is not too great to be pestered by the
despicable hordes of beggars for blood) were dis-

VAMPIRE OF INDIA 69

lodged from their feeding grounds about his head

and neck, and, trying to settle about his rear parts,

were driven back again by the swinging of his tail.

Then I should say that ear is just a fan. How

significant it is that among the emblems of royalty

in the East the three chiefest are an umbrella-bearer,

two men who stand behind and swing great punkahs »
modelled on the elephant’s ear, and two others

carrying yak’s tails wherewith to scare the flies

from the royal person! The elephant is a rajah!

There is another mysterious ear which is a
stumbling-block to the simple theory-monger. It is
in fashion among a tribe of bats to which belongs
the so-called vampire of India. This monster is
fond of coming into your bedroom at midnight
‘through the open windows, but not to suck your
blood, for it has little in common with the true
vampire of South America. It brings its dinner
with it and hangs from the ceiling, “‘ feeding like
horses when you hear them feed.’’ You hear its
jaws working—crunch, crunch, crunch, but feel too
drowsy to get up and expel it.

When you get up in the morning there on your
clean dressing table, just below the place where it
hung, are the bloody remains of a sparrow, or the
crumbs of a tree-frog. The servants will tell you
that the sparrow was killed and eaten by a rat, but
if you rise softly next night when you hear the sound
of feeding, and shut the windows, you will find a
goblin hanging from the ceiling in the morning,

70 EARS

hideous beyond the power of words to tell. Its
ears, thin, membranous and longer than its head,
tremble incessantly. Inside of them is another
pair, much smaller than the first, and tuned to their
octave, I should guess, while two membranous
smelling trumpets of similar pattern rise over the
nose. What is the meaning of these repulsive
instruments, and how does that strange beast catch
sparrows? When it comes out after dark and
quarters the garden, passing swiftly under and
through the branches of trees, they are sound
asleep hidden among the leaves, motionless and
silent. But their flesh may be scented, and their
gentle breathing heard if you have instruments
sufficiently delicate. Then the ample wings may
suddenly enfold the sleeping body, and the savage
jaws grip the startled head before there is time even
to scream. Without a doubt this is the secret
of the vampire bat’s ears.

But to find food and flee death are not the only
interests in life even to the meanest creature. There
are social pleasures, family affections and fellowship,
sympathy and co-operation in the struggles of life.
And there is love.

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque,
Et genus zquoreum, pecudes, picteeque volucres,
In furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem.

The chirping of the cricket, the song of the lark,
the call of the sentinel crane, the watchword with

THE EARS OF AN ASS 71

which the migratory geese keep their squadrons
together, the howling of jackals, the lowing of cows,
the hum of the hive, the chatter of the drawing-room,
and a hundred other voices in forest and field and
town remind us that the voice and the ear are the
pair of wheels on which society runs.

And this thought points the way out of another
contradictious puzzle, that which confronts my
argument from the ears of an ass. It roams treeless
deserts where no foe can approach unseen. Thistles
make no sound. Why should it be adorned with
ears which in their amplitude are scarcely surpassed
by those of the rabbit and the hare. There is no
answer unless their function is to hear the bray of
a fellow-ass. . . . One may object that that majestic
sound is surely of force to impress itself without
any aid from an external ear; but that is a vain
argument built on the costermonger’s moke—
dreary exile from its fatherland. Remember that
its ancestors wandered on the steppes of Central
Asia or the borders of the Sahara. In those bound-
less solitudes, with nothing that eye can see or that
common ear can hear to remind her that she is not
the sole inhabitant of the universe, the wild ass
‘“snuffeth up the wind in her desire,” and lifting
her windsails to the hot blast, hears, borne across
miles of white sand and shimmering mirage, the
joyful reverberations of that music which tells of
old comrades and boon companions scouring the
plain and kicking up their exultant heels.

13

"2 EARS

Monkeys taking to trees were like the birds, they
scarcely needed ears. And so by the high road of
evolution you arrive at man and the enigma of
his ear. It is a shrunken and shrivelled remnant,
a moss-grown ruin, a derelict ship. It is to a
pattern ear what the old shoe which you find in a
country lane, shed from the foot of some “ unem-
ployed,” is to one of Waukenphast’s “ five-miles-an-
hour-easy”’ boots. We ought to temper our con-
tempt for what it is with respect for what it was.
All the parts of it are there and recognisable, even
to the muscles that should move it, but we have
lost control of them. I believe anyone could regain
that by persevering exercise of his will power for
a time—that is, if he has any. I have a friend who,
if you treat him with disrespect, shrivels you up
with a sarcastic wag of his right ear.

The ears of dogs open up another vista for the
questioning philosopher. Their day is past, too,
and man may cut them short to match his own,
but the dog grows them longer than before. When
he first took service with man, and grew careless
and lazy, the muscles got slack and the ears dropped,
which is in accordance with Nature. Then, instead
of being allowed to wither away, they have been
handed over to the milliner and shaped and trimmed
in harmony with the ‘‘style’’ of each breed of
dogs. Howit has been done is one of those mysteries
which will not open to the iron keys of Darwin.
But there it is for those to see who have eyes.

MOTHER’S DARLING 7s

The ears of the little dogs bred for ladies’ laps are
the curls of a mother’s darling ; the pendant love-
locks of the old, old maid
who, despite of changeful
fashions, clings to those
memorials of the pensive
beauty of her youth, are
repeated in solemn mimicry
by the dachshund trotting
at her heels; but the sensible
fur cap of the dignified
Newfoundland reminds us
of the cold regions from
which his forefathers came.
Some kinds of terriers stil] "*® cuss OF A oTHER’s
have their ears starched up
to look perky, and I have occasionally seen a dog
with one ear up and the other down as if straining
after the elusive idea expressed in the Baden-Powell
hat. All which shows that “one touch of nature
makes the whole world kin.”

VI
TOMMY
THE STORY OF AN OWL

Amonc the many and various strangers within my
gates who have helped to enliven the days of my
exile, Tommy was one towards whom I still feel
a certain sense of obligation because he taught me
for the first time what an owl is. For Tommy was
an owl. From any dictionary you may ascertain
that an owl is a nocturnal, carnivorous bird, of a
short, stout form, with downy feathers and a large
head ; and if that does not satisfy you, there is no
lack of books which will furnish fuller and more
precise descriptions.

But descriptions cannot impart acquaintance. I
had sought acquaintance and had gained some
knowledge such as books cannot supply, not only
of owls in general, but of that particular species of
owls to which Tommy belonged, who, in the heral-
dry of ornithology, was Carine brahma, an Indian
spotted owlet. This branch of the ancient family
of owls has always been eccentric. It does not
mope and to the moon complain. It flouts the moon

74

BIRTH OF TOMMY a5

and the sun and everyone who passes by, showing
its round face at its door and even coming out, at
odd times of the day, to stare and bob and play the
clown. It does not cry ‘‘ Tuwhoo, Tuwhoo,’” as the
poets would have it, but laughs, jabbers, squeaks
and chants clamorous duets with its spouse.

All this I knew. I had also gathered from his
public appearances that a spotted owlet is happy in
his domestic life and that he is fond of fat white
ants, for, when their winged swarms were flying,
I had seen him making short flights from his perch
in a tree and catching them with his feet; and I
believed that he fed in secret on mice and lizards.
But all that did not amount to understanding an
owl, as I discovered when Tommy became a member
of our chummery.

Tommy was born in ‘the second city of the
British Empire,’ to wit, Bombay, in the month of
March, r90r. His birthplace was a hole in an old
“Coral” tree. Domestic life in that hole was not
conducted with regularity. Meals were at uncertain
hours and uncertain also in their quantity and
quality. The parents were hunters and were absent
for long periods, and though there was incredible
shouting and laughter when they returned, they
came at such irregular times that we did not suspect
that they were permanent residents and had a
family. One night, however, Tommy, being pre-
cocious and, as we discovered afterwards, keen on
seeing life, took advantage of parental absence to

76 TOMMY

clamber to the entrance of the nursery and, losing
his balance, toppled over into the garden. He kept
cool, however, and tried to conceal himself, but
Hurree the malee, watering the plants early in the
morning, spied him lying with his face on the earth
and brought him to us.

He seemed dead, but he was very much alive, as
appeared when he was made to sit up and turned
those wonderful eyes of his upon us. He was a
droll little object at that time, nearly globular in
form and covered with down, like a toy for children
to play with. His head turned like a revolving
lighthouse and flared those eyes upon you wherever
you went, great luminous orbs, black-centred and
gold-ringed and full of silent wonder, or, I should
rather say, surprise. This never left him. To the
last everything that presented itself to his gaze,
though he had seen it a hundred times, seemed to
fill him with fresh surprise. Nothing ever. became
familiar. What an enviable cast of mind! It must
make the brightness of childhood perennial.

There was some discussion as to how Tommy
should be fed, and we finally decided that one should
try to open the small hooked beak, whose point
could just be detected protruding from a nest of
fluff, while another held a piece of raw meat ready
to pop in. It did not look an easy job, but we had
scarcely set about it when Tommy himself solved
the difficulty by plucking the meat out of our
fingers and swallowing it. This early intimation

EXCURSIONS 77

that, however absent he might look, he was “ all
there’’ was never belied, and there was no further
difficulty about the feeding of him. When he saw
us coming he always fell into the same ridiculous
attitude, with his face in the dust, but we just
picked him up and stood him on his proper end
and showed him the meat and -his bashfulness
vanished at once.

After sunset he would get lively and begin calling
for his mother in a strange husky voice. At this
time we would let him out in the garden, watching
him closely, for, if he thought he was alone, he would
sneak away slyly, then make a run for liberty,
hobbling along at a good rate with the aid of his
wings, though he never attempted to fly as yet.
When detected and overtaken, he fell on his face as
before. One memorable day he found a hole in
a stone wall and, before we could stop him, he was
in. The hole was too small to admit a hand,
though not a rat or a snake, so the prospect was
gloomy. Suddenly a happy inspiration came to
me. That sad, husky cry with which he expressed
his need of a mother was not difficult to mimic,
and he might be cheated into thinking that a lost
brother or sister was looking for him. I retired
and made the attempt, and, hark! a faint echo
came from the wall. At each repetition it became
clearer, until the round face and great eyes appeared
at the mouth of the hole. Then the round body
tumbled out, and little Tommy was hobbling about,

78 TOMMY

looking, with pathetic eagerness, for “the old
familiar faces.’ When he discovered how he had
been betrayed, his face went down and he suffered
himself to be carried quietly to the canary’s cage
in which he was kept.

It seemed to be time now to begin Tommy’s
education, for I judged that, if he had been at home,
he would ere then have been getting nightly lessons
in the poacher’s art. So I procured a small gecko,
one of those grey house lizards, with pellets at the
ends of their toes, which come down from the roof
after the lamps are lit and gorge themselves on the
foolish moths and plant bugs that come to the
light. Securing it with a thin cord tied round its
waist, I introduced it into Tommy’s cage. He
looked surprised, very much surprised. He raised
himself to his full height. He gazed at it. He
curtseyed. He gave a little jump and was standing
with both feet on the lizard. A moment more
and the lizard was gliding down his throat with my
thin cord after it. Mr. Seton Thompson would have
us believe that all young things are laboriously
trained by their parents, just like human children,
and if he was an eye-witness of all the scenes that
he describes so vividly, it must be so with other
young things. But he did not know Tommy, who
is the bird of Minerva and evidently sprang into
being, like his patron goddess, with all his armour
on.

After a time, when he had exchanged his infant

TABLE MANNERS 79

down for a suit of feathers, he was promoted to a
large cage out in the garden, and his regular diet
was a little raw meat or a mutton bone tied to one
of his perches, but, by way of a treat, I would offer
him, whenever I could get it, a locust, or large grass-
hopper. His way of accepting this was unique and
pretty. He would look surprised, stare, curtsey
once or twice, stare again and then, suddenly, noise-
lessly and as lightly as a fairy, flit across the cage
and, without alighting, pluck the insect from my
fingers with both his feet and return to his perch.

Why he bowed to his food and to everybody and
everything that presented itself before him was a
riddle that I never solved. A materialistic friend
suggested that he was adjusting the focus of his
wonderful eyes, and the action was certainly like
that of an optician examining a lens; but I feel
that there was something more ceremonial about it.
This punctiliousness cost him his dinner once. I
was curious to know what he would do with a
mouse, so, having caught one alive, I slipped it
quietly into his cage. He was more surprised than
ever before, raised himself erect, bowed to the earth
once, twice and three times, stared, bowed again
and so on until, to his evident astonishment and
chagrin, the mouse found an opening and was gone.
The lesson was not lost. A few days later I got
another mouse, to which he began to do obeisance
as before, but very soon and suddenly, though as
softly as falling snow, he plumped upon it with

14

80 TOMMY

both feet and, spreading his wings on the ground,
looked all round him with infinite satisfaction.
The mouse squeaked, but he stopped that by cracking
its skull quietly with his beak. Then he gathered
himself up and flew to the perch with his prize.

One thing I noted about Tommy most emphati-
cally. He never showed a sign of affection, or
what is called attachment. He maintained a strictly
bowing acquaintance with me. He was not afraid,
but he would suffer no familiarity. He would
come and eat, with due ceremony, out of my hand,
but if I offered to touch him he was surprised and
affronted and went off at once. When I moved to
another house I found that I could not continue
to keep him, so I sent him to the zoological garden,
where I visited him sometimes, but he never vouch-
safed a token of recognition. His heart was locked
except to his own kin.

But since that time, when I have seen an owl,
even a barn owl, or a great horned owl, swiftly
cross the sky in the darkness of night, I have felt
that I could accompany it, in imagination, on its
secret quest. It will arrive silently, like the angel
of death, in a tree overlooking a field in which a
rat, whose hour has come, is furtively feeding, all
alert and tremulous, but unaware of any impending
danger. The rat will go on feeding, unconscious
of the mocking curtsey and the baleful eyes that
follow with mute attention its every motion, until
the hand of the clock has moved to the point assigned

BIRDS OF PREY 81

by fate, and then it will feel eight sharp talons
plunged into its flesh. I have seen the fierce dash
of the sparrow hawk into a crowd of unsuspecting
sparrows, I know the triumph of the falcon as it
rises for the final, fatal swoop on the flying duck,
and I have watched the kestrel, high in air, scanning
the field for some rash mouse or lizard that has
wandered too far from shelter. The owl is also a
bird of prey, but its idea is different from all these.

Vil
THE BARN OWL
A FRIEND OF MAN

A THUNDERSTORM has burst on the common rat.
Its complicity in the spread of the plague, which
has been proved up to the hilt, has filled the cup of
its iniquities to overflowing, and we have awakened
to the fact that it is and always has been an arch-
enemy of mankind. Simultaneously, in widely
separated parts of the world, a ‘‘ pogrom”’ has been
proclaimed, and the accounts of the massacre which
come to us from great cities like Calcutta and
Bombay are appalling and almost incredible. They
would move to pity the most callous heart, if pity
could be associated with the rat. But it cannot.
The wild rat deserves that humane consideration
to which all our natural fellow-creatures on this earth
are entitled ; but the domestic rat (I use this term
advisedly, for though man has not domesticated it,
it has thoroughly domesticated itself) cannot justify
its existence. It is a fungus of civilisation. If it
confined itself to its natural food, the farmer’s

grain, the tax which it levies on the country would
82

REMARKS ON RATS 83

still be such as no free people ought to endure. But
it confines itself to nothing. As Waterton says:
“ After dining on carrion in the filthiest sink, it
will often manage to sup on the choicest dainties of
the larder, where like Celceno of old vestigia foeda
velinguit.’ It kills chickens, plunders the nests of
little birds, devouring mother, eggs and young,
murders and feeds on its brothers and sisters and
even its own offspring, and not infrequently tastes
even man when it finds him asleep. The bite of a
rat is sometimes very poisonous, and I have had to
give three months’ sick leave to a clerk who had
been bitten by one. Add to this that the rat multi-
plies at a rate which is simply criminal, rearing a
family of perhaps a dozen every two or three
months, and no further argument is needed to justify
the war which has been declared against it. Every
engine of war will, no doubt, be brought into use,
traps of many kinds, poisons, cats, the professional
rat-catcher, and a rat bacillus which, if once it
gets a footing, is expected to originate a fearful
epidemic.

But I need not linger any more among rats, which
are not my subject. I am writing in the hope that
this may be an opportune time to put in a plea for
a much persecuted native of this and many other
countries, whose principal function in the economy
of nature is to kill rats and mice. The barn, or
screech, owl, which is found over a great part of
Europe and Asia and also in America, was once

84 THE BARN OWL

very common in Britain, inhabiting every ‘“ivy-
mantled tower,’ church steeple, barn loft, hollow
tree, or dovecot, in which it could get a lodging.
But it was never welcome. Like the Jews in the
days of King John it has been relentlessly persecuted
by superstition, ignorance and avarice. Avarice,
instigated by ladies and milliners, has looked with
covetous eye on its downy and beautiful plumes ;
while ignorance and superstition have feared and
hated the owl in all countries and all ages. In
ancient Rome it was a bird of evil omen.

Foedaque fit volucris venturi nuncia luctus,
Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen.

In India, to-day, if an owl sits on the house-top,
the occupants dare scarcely lie down to sleep, for
they know that the devil is walking the rooms and
marking someone for death. Lady Macbeth, when
about the murder of Duncan, starts and whispers,

Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked,
The fatal bellman,

And even as late as the nineteenth century, Water-
ton’s aged housekeeper ‘‘ knew full well what sorrow
it had brought into other houses when she was a
young woman.” Witches, like modern ladies of
fashion, set great value on its wings. The latter stick
them on their hats, the witches in Macbeth threw
them into their boiling cauldron. Horace’s Canidia
could not complete her recipe without

“ Plumamque nocturne strigis.”

HARMLESS BIRDS 85

We may suppose that in Britain these supersti-
tions are gone for ever, killed and buried by board
schools and compulsory education. If they are
(there is room for an if) they have been succeeded
by a worse, the superstition of gamekeepers and
farmers. It is worse in effect, because these men
have guns, which their predecessors had not. And
it is more wicked, because it is founded on an ignor-
ance for which there is no excuse. How little harm
the barn owl is likely to do game may be inferred
from the fact that, when it makes its lodging in a
dovecot, the pigeons suffer no concern! Water-
ton (and no better authority could be quoted) scouts
the idea, common among farmers, that its business
there is to eat the pigeons’ eggs. ‘‘ They lay the
saddle,” he says, ‘‘on the wrong horse. They ought
to put it on the rat.’ His predecessor in the estate
had allowed the owls to be destroyed and the rats
to multiply, and there were few young pigeons
in the dovecot. Waterton took strong measures to
exterminate the rats, but built breeding places for
the owls, and the dovecot, which they constantly
frequented, became prolific again.

But granting that the owls did twice the injury
to game with which they are credited, it would
be repaid many times over by their services. Water-
ton well says that, if we knew its utility in thinning
the country of mice, it would be with us what the
ibis was with the Egyptians—a sacred bird. He
examined the pellets ejected by a pair of owls that

86 THE BARN OWL

occupied a ruined gateway on the estate. Every
pellet contained skeletons of from four to seven
mice. Owls, it may be necessary to explain,
swallow their food without separating flesh from
bone, skin and hair, and afterwards disgorge the
indigestible portions rolled up into little balls.
In sixteen months the pair of owls above-mentioned
had accumulated a deposit of more than a bushel
of these pellets, each a funeral urn of from four to
seven mice! In the old Portuguese fort of Bassein
in Western India I noticed that the earth at the foot
of a ruined tower was plentifully mixed with small
skulls, jaws and other bones. Taking home a hand-
ful and examining them, I found that they were
the remains of rats, mice and muskrats.

The owl kills small birds, large insects, frogs and
even fishes, but these are extras: its profession
is rat-catching and mousing, and only those who
have a very intimate personal acquaintance with
it know how peculiarly its equipment and methods
are adapted to this work. The falcon gives open
chase to the wild duck, keeping above it if possible
until near enough for a last spurt; then it comes
down at a speed which is terrific, and, striking the
duck from above, dashes it to the ground. The
sparrow hawk plunges unexpectedly into a group of
little birds and nips up one with a long outstretched
foot before they have time to get clear of each
other. The harrier skims over field, copse and
meadow, suddenly rounding corners and topping

THE OWLS METHOD 87

fences and surprising small birds, or mice, on which
it drops before they have recovered from their
surprise.

The owl does none of these things. For one
thing, it hunts in the night, when its sight is keenest
and rats are abroad feeding. Its flight is almost
noiseless and yet marvellously light and rapid when
it pleases. Sailing over field, lane and hedgerow
and examining the ground as it goes, it finds a
likely place and takes a post of observation on a
fence perhaps, or a sheaf of corn. Here it sits, bolt
upright, all eyes. It sees a rat emerge from the
grass and advance slowly, as it feeds, into open
ground. There is no hurry, for the doom of that
rat is already fixed. So the owl just sits and watches
till the right moment has arrived; then it flits
swiftly, softly, silently, across the intervening space
and drops like a flake of snow. Without warning,
or suspicion of danger, the rat feels eight sharp
claws buried in its flesh. It protests with frantic
squeals, but these are stopped with a nip that
crunches its skull, and the owl is away with it to
the old tower, where the hungry children are calling,
with weird, impatient hisses, for something to eat.

The owl does not hunt the fields and hedgerows
only. It goes to all places where rats or mice may
be, reconnoitres farmyards, barns and dwelling
houses and boldly enters open windows. Sometimes
it hovers in the air, like a kestrel, scanning the
ground below. And though its regular hunting

15

88 THE BARN OWL

hours are from dusk till dawn, it has been seen at
work as late as nine or ten on a bright summer
morning. But the vulgar boys of bird society are
fond of mobbing it when it appears abroad by day,
and it dislikes publicity.

The barn owl lays its eggs in the places which
it inhabits. There is usually a thick bed of pellets
on the floor, and it considers no other nest needful.
The eggs are said to be laid in pairs. There may be
two, four, or six, of different eggs, in the nest, and
perhaps a young one, or two, at the same time. Eggs
are found from April, or even March, till June or
July, and there is, sometimes at any rate, a second
brood as late as November or December. This owl
does not hoot, but screeches. A weird and ghostly
voice it is, from which, according to Ovid, the bird
has its Latin name, Strix (pronounced “‘ Streex,”
probably, at that time).

Est illis strigibus nomen, sed nominis hujus.
Causa, quod horrenda stridere nocte silent.

It is a sound which, coming suddenly out of the
darkness, might well start fears and forebodings in
the dark and guilty mind of untutored man, which
would not be dispelled by a nearer view of the
strange object from which they proceeded. White,
ghostly, upright, spindle-shaped and biggest at the
top, where two great orbs flare, like fiery bull’s-eyes,
from the centres of two round white targets, it
stands solemn and speechless; you approach nearer

WILL-O’-THE-WISP 89

and it falls into fearsome pantomimic attitudes and
grimaces, like a clown trying to frighten a child.
And now a new horror has been added to the barn
owl. The numerous letters which appeared in The
Times and were summarised, with comments, by
Sir T. Digby Pigott, C.B., in The Contemporary
Review of July 1908, leave no reasonable room for
doubt that this bird sometimes becomes brightly
luminous, and is the will-o’-the-wisp for believing in
which we are deriding our forefathers. All things
considered, I cannot withhold my sympathy and
some respect for the superstition of aged house-
keepers, Romans and Indians. For that of game-
keepers and farmers I have neither. All our new
schemes of “Nature study’’ will surely deserve
the reproach of futility if, in the next generation,
every farmhouse in England has not its own Owl
Tower for the encouragement of this friend of man.

Vill
DOMESTIC ANIMALS

Lone before Jubal became the father of all such as
handle the harp and the organ and Tubalcain the
instructor of every artificer in brass and iron, Abel
was a keeper of sheep, but the sacred writer has not
informed us how he first caught them and tamed
them. If we consult other records of the infancy
of the human race, they reveal as little. When the
Egyptians began to portray their daily life on stone
6,000 or 7,000 years ago, they already had cattle
and sheep, geese and ducks and dogs and plenty of
asses, though not horses. They got these from the
Assyrians, who had used them in their chariots long
before they began to record anything.

Further back than this we have no one to question
except those shadowy men of the Stone Age who
have left us heaps of their implements, but none of
their bones. They were not so careful of the bones
of horses, which lie in thousands about the precincts
of their untidy villages, but not a scrawl on a bit
of a mammoth tusk has been found to indicate
whether these were ridden and driven, or only

hunted and eaten.
90

THEN AND NOW gr

Why should it be recorded that Cadmus invented
letters? Why should we inquire who first made
gunpowder and glass? Why should every school-
boy be taught that Watt was the inventor of the
steam engine? Can any of these be put in the
scale, as benefactors of our race, with the man who
first trained a horse to carry him on its back, or
drew milk with his hands from the udders of a cow ?
The familiarity of the thing has made us callous to
the wonder of it. Let us put it before us, like a
painting or a statue, and have a good look at it.

There is a farmhouse, any common farmhouse,
just one of the molecules that constitute the mass
of our wholesome country life. A horse is being
harnessed for the plough: its ancestors sniffed the
wind on the steppes of Tartary. Meek cows are
standing to be milked: when primitive man first
knew them in their native forests he used to give
them a wide berth, for his flint arrows fell harmless
off their tough hides, and they were fierce exceedingly.
A cock is crowing on the fence as if the whole farm
belonged to himself: he ought to be skulking in an
Indian jungle. The sheep have no business here:
their place is on the rocky mountains of Asia. As
for the dog, it is difficult to assign it a country, for
it owns no wild kindred in any part of the world,
but it ought at least to be worrying the sheep. If
there is an ass, it is a native of Abyssinia, and the
Turkeys are Americans. The cat derives its descent
from an Egyptian.

g2 DOMESTIC ANIMALS

But all these are of one country now and of one
religion. They know no home nor desire any,
except the farmhouse, in which they were born and
bred, and the lord of it is their lord, to whom they
look for food and protection. And what would he
do without them? What should we do without
them? It is impossible to conceive that life could
be carried on if we were deprived of these obedient
and uncomplaining servants. High civilisation has
been attained without steam engines; education,
as we use the term now, is superfluous—Runjeet
Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, could neither read
nor write; the human race has prospered and multi-
plied without the knowledge of iron ; but we know
of no time when man did without domestic animals.

It is vain to speculate how the thing first came
about, whether the sportive anthropoid ape took
to riding on a wild goat before he emerged as a man
keeping flocks, or whether some great pioneer,
destined to be worshipped in after ages as a demigod,
showed his fellows how the wild calves, if taken
young, might be trained into tractable slaves;
and it is hopeless to expect that any record will now
leap to light which will give us knowledge in place
of speculation. But it might not be unprofitable
to seek for some clue to the strange selection which
the domesticating genius of man has made from
among the multifarious material presented to it by
the animal kingdom. If we do so we shall almost
be forced to the conclusion that domesticability is

THE PIGEON FAMILY - 93

a character, or quality, inherent in some animals
and entirely wanting in others.

Let us begin with pigeons, a very large group,
but one that shows more unity than any of the other
Orders into which naturalists divide birds. It
embraces turtle doves of many species, wood
pigeons, ground pigeons, fruit pigeons and some
strange forms like the great crowned pigeon of
Victoria. Of all these only one, the common blue
rock, has been domesticated. The ring dove of
Asia has been kept as a cage bird for so long that a
permanent albino and also a fawn-coloured variety
have been established and are more common in
aviaries than birds of the natural colour; but the
ring dove has not become a domestic fowl, and never
will. In this instance there is a plausible explana-
tion, for the blue rock, unlike the rest of the tribe,
nests and roosts in holes and is also gregarious ;
therefore, if provided with accommodation of the
kind it requires, it will form a permanent settlement
and remain with us on the same terms as the honey
bee ; while the ring dove, not caring for a fixed home,
must be confined, however tame it may become, or
it will wander and be lost.

But this explanation will not fit other cases.
What a multitude of wild ducks there are in Scotland
and every other country, mallards, pintails, gad-
walls, widgeons, pochards and teals, all very much
alike in their habits and tastes! But of them all
only one species, and that a migratory one, the

94 DOMESTIC ANIMALS

mallard, has been persuaded to abandon its wander-
ing ways and settle down to a life of ease and obesity
as a dependant of man. In India there is a duck
of the same genus as the mallard, known as the
spotted-billed duck (Anas poecilorhynchus), which
is as large as the mallard and quite as tasty, and is,
moreover, not migratory, but remains and breeds
in the country. But it has not been domesticated :
the tame ducks in India, as here, are all mallards.
The muscovy duck is a distinct species which has
been domesticated elsewhere and introduced.

From the ducks let us turn to the hens. The
partridge, grouse and pheasant are all dainty birds,
but if we desire to eat them we must shoot them, or
(proh pudor /) snare them. Plover’s eggs are worth
four shillings a dozen, but we must seek them on
the moors. The birds that have covenanted to
accept our food and protection and lay their eggs
for our use and rear their young for us to kill are
descended from Gallus bankivus, the jungle fowl
of Eastern India. How they came here history
records not: perhaps the gipsies brought them.
They appear now in strange and diverse guise, the
ponderous and feather-legged Cochin-China, the
clean-limbed and wiry game, the crested Houdan,
the Minorca with its monstrous comb, and the puny
bantam. In Japan there is a breed that carries a
tail seven or eight feet in length, which has to be
“done’’ regularly like a lady’s hair, to keep it from
dirt and damage.

REVERSION TO WILDNESS 95

But however their outward aspects may differ,
they are of the same blood and know it. A feather-
weight bantam cock will stand up to an elephan-
tine brahma and fight him according to the rules of
the ring and next minute pay compliments to his
lady in language which she will be at no loss to
understand. And if the artificial conditions of
their life were removed, they would soon all lapse
alike to the image of the stock from which they are
sprung. This is well illustrated in a show case in
the South Kensington Museum exhibiting a group
of fowls from Pitcairn’s Island. These are descended
from some stock landed by the mutinous crew of
H.M.S. Bounty in 1790, which ran wild, and in a
century they have gone back to the small size and
lithe figure and almost to the game colour of the
wild birds from which they branched off before
history dawned.

If we turn next to the Ruminants, the clean beasts
which chew the cud and divide the hoof, the puzzle
becomes harder still. Deer and antelopes are often
kept as pets, and become so tame that they are
allowed to wander at liberty. In Egypt herds of
gazelles were so kept before the days of Cheops. In
India I have known a black buck which regularly
attended the station cricket ground, moving among
the nervous players with its nose in the air and
insolence in its gait, fully aware that eighteen-inch
horns with very sharp points insured respectful

treatment. Mr. Sterndale trained a Neilghai to go
16

96 DOMESTIC ANIMALS

in harness. The great bovine antelopes of Africa
would become as tame, and there is no reason to
suppose that their beef and milk would not be as
good as those of the cow. But no antelope or deer
appears ever to have been domesticated, with the
exception of the reindeer.

Of the other ruminants the ox, buffalo, yak, goat,
sheep and a few others are domestic animals, while
the bison and the gaur, or so-called Indian bison,
and a large number of wild goats and sheep have
been neglected. The buffalo and yak have probably
come under the yoke in comparatively recent times,
for they are little changed; but the goat and still
more the sheep have undergone a wonderful trans-
formation within and without. Who could recognise
in a Leicester ewe the wary denizen of precipitous
mountains which will not feed until it has set a
sentinel to give warning if danger approaches? And
here is a curious fact which has scarcely been noticed
by naturalists.

The original of our goat is supposed to be the
Persian ibex. At any rate, it was an ibex of some
species, as its horns plainly show. But on the
plains of Northern India, under ranges of hills on
which the Persian ibex wanders wild, the common
domestic goat is a very different animal from that
of Europe, and has peculiar spiral horns of the same
pattern as the markhor, another grand species of
wild goat which draws eager hunters to the higher
reaches of the same mountains. From this it would

SUBJUGATION OR EXTERMINATION 97

appear that two species of wild goat have been
domesticated and kept to some extent distinct, one
eventually finding its way westward, but not east-
ward and southward.

The Indian humped cattle also differ so widely
in form, structure and voice from those of Europe
that there can scarcely be a doubt of their descent
from distinct species. But both have entirely dis-
appeared as wild animals, unless indeed the white
cattle of Chillingham are really descendants of
Ceesar’s dreadful urus and not merely domestic
cattle lapsed into savagery. So have the camel, and,
with a similar possible exception, the horse. Was
the whole race in each of these cases subjugated, or
exterminated, and that by uncivilised man with his
primitive weapons? There is no analogy here
with the extinction of such animals as the mam-
moth, for the ox is a beast in every way fitted to
live and thrive in the present condition of this
world, as much so as the buffalo and the Indian
bison, which show no sign of approaching extinction.
Our fathers easily got rid of the difficulty by assum-
ing that Noah never released these species after the
Flood, but what shall those do who cannot believe
in the literality of Noah’s ark?

As for the dog, its domestication has been the
creation of a new species. The material was perhaps
the wolf, more likely the jackal, but possibly a blend
of more than one species. But a dog is now a dog
and neither a wolf nor a jackal. A mastiff, a pug, a

98 DOMESTIC ANIMALS

collie, a greyhound, a pariah all recognise each other
and observe the same rules of etiquette when they
meet.

We must admit, however, that, whatever pliability
of disposition, or other inherent suitability, led to
the first domestication of certain species of animals,
the changes induced in their natures by many genera-
tions of domesticity have made them amenable to
man’s control to a degree which puts a wide differ-
ence between them and their wild relations. A
wild ass, though brought up from its birth in a
stable, would make a very intractable costermonger’s
moke. We may infer from this that the first
subjugation of each of our common domestic animals
was the achievement of some genius, or of some
tribe favourably situated, and that they spread
from that centre by sale or barter, rather than that
they were separately domesticated in many places.
This would partly explain why a few species of
widely different families are so universally kept in
all countries to the exclusion of hundreds of species
nearly allied and apparently as suitable. When a
want could be supplied by obtaining from another
country an animal bred to live with man and serve
him, the long and difficult task of softening down the
wild instincts of a beast taken from the forests or the
hills and acclimatising its constitution to a domestic
life was not likely to be attempted.

But there have been a few recent additions to
our list of domestic animals. The turkey and the

A NOBLE OPENING 99

guinea fowl are examples, and perhaps within another
generation we may be able to add the zebra. And
there may be many other animals fitted to enrich
and adorn human life which would make no insuper-
able resistance to domestication if wisely and
patiently handled. Here is a noble opening for
carrying out in its kindest sense the command,
“Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it:
and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the face of the earth.”

IX
SNAKES

I HAVE met persons, otherwise quite sane, who told
me that they would like to visit India if it were not
for the snakes. Now there is something very depress-
ing in the thought that this state of mind is extant
in England, for it is calculated, on occasion, to have
results of a most melancholy nature. By way of
example, let us picture the case of a broken-hearted
maiden forced to reject an ardent lover because
duty calls him to a land where there are snakes.
Think of his happiness blighted for ever and her
doomed to a ‘“‘ perpetual maidenhood,” harrowed
with remorseful dreams of the hourly perils and
horrors through which he must be passing without
her, and dreading to enter an academy or picture-
gallery lest a laocoon or a fury might revive appre-
hensions too horrible to be borne. In view of
possibilities so dreadful, surely it is a duty that a
man owes to his kind to disseminate the truth, if
he can, about the present condition in the East of
that reptile which, crawling on its belly and eating
dust and having its head bruised by the descendants

100

264 SPECIES OF SNAKES Tor

of Eve, sometimes pays off her share of the curse
on their heels. Here the truth is.

Within the limits of our Indian Empire, including
Burmah and Ceylon, there are at present known to
naturalists two hundred and sixty-four species of
snakes. Twenty-seven of these are sea-serpents,
which never leave the sea, and could not if they
would. The remaining two hundred and thirty-
seven species comprise samples of every size and
pattern of limbless reptile found on this globe, from
the gigantic python, which crushes a jackal and
swallows it whole, to the little burrowing Typhlops,
whose proportions are those of an earthworm and
its food white ants.

If you have made up your mind never to touch
a snake or go nearer to one than you can help, then
I need scarcely tell you what you know already,
that thegg are all alike, hideous and repulsive in
their aspect}’being smeared from head to tail with
a viscous and venomous slime, which, as your
Shakespeare will tell you, leaves a trail even on fig-
leaves when they have occasion to pass over such.
This preparation would appear to line them inside
as well as out, for there is no lack of ancient and
modern testimony to the fact that they ‘“‘slaver”
their prey all over before swallowing it, that it may
slide the more easily down their ghastly throats.
Their eye is cruel and stony, and possesses a peculiar
property known as “‘ fascination,’ which places their
victims entirely at their mercy. They have also

102 SNAKES

the power of coiling themselves up like a watch-
spring and discharging themselves from a consider-
able distance at those whom they have doomed to
death—a fact which is attested by such passages in
the poets as—

Like adder darting from his coil,

and by travellers passim.

This is the true faith with respect to all serpents,
and if you are resolved to remain steadfast in it,
you may do so even in India Mor it is possible to |
live in that country for months, I might almost say
years, without ever getting a sight of a live snake
except in the basket of a snake-charmer. If, how-
ever, you are minded to cultivate an acquaintance
with them, it is not difficult to find opportunities
of doing so, but I must warn you that it will be
with jeopardy to your faith, for the very first thing
that will strike you about them will probably be
their cleanness. What has become of the classical.
slime I cannot tell, but it is a fact that the skin of
a modern snake is always delightfully dry and
clean, and as smooth to the touch as velvet.

The next thing that attracts attention is their
beauty, not so much the beauty of their colours as
of their forms. With few exceptions, snakes are the
most graceful of living things. Every position into
which they put themselves, and every motion of
their perfectly proportioned forms, is artistic. The
effect of this is enhanced by their gentleness and
the softness of their movements.

TIMIDITY OF SNAKES 103

But if you want to see them properly, you must
be careful not to frighten them, for there is no
creature more timid at heart than a snake. One
will sometimes let you get quite near to it and watch
it, simply because it does not notice you, being
rather deaf and very shortsighted, but when it does
discover your presence, its one thought is to slip
away quietly and hide itself. It is on account of
this extreme timidity that we see them so seldom.

Of the two hundred and thirty-seven kinds that
I have referred to, some are, of course, very rare,
or only found in particular parts of the country, but
at least forty or fifty of them occur everywhere, and
some are as plentiful as crows. Yet they keep
themselves out of our way so successfully that it is
quite arare event to meet with one. Occasionally one
finds its way into a house in quest of frogs, lizards,
musk-rats, or some other of the numerous male-
factors that use our dwellings as cities of refuge
from the avenger, and it is discovered by the Hamal
behind a cupboard, or under a carpet. He does the
one thing which it occurs to a native to do in any
emergency—viz. raises an alarm. Then there is a
general hubbub, servants rush together with the
longest sticks they can find, the children are hurried
away to a place of safety, the master appears on
the scene, armed with his gun, and the

Wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie,

trying to slip away from the fuss which it dislikes
17

104 SNAKES

so much, is headed, and blown, or battered, to pieces.
Then its head is pounded to a jelly, for the servants
are agreed that, if this precaution is omitted, it
will revive during the night and come and coil
itself on the chest of its murderer.

Finally a council is held and a unanimous resolu-
tion recorded that deceased was a serpent of the
deadliest kind. This is not a lie, for they believe
it ; but in the great majority of cases it is an untruth.
Of our two hundred and thirty-seven kinds of snakes
only forty-four are ranked by naturalists as venomous,
and many of these are quite incapable of killing
any animal as large asa man. Others are very rare
or local. In short, we may reckon the poisonous
snakes with which we have any practical concern
at four kinds, and the chance of a snake found in
the house belonging to one of these kinds stands at
less than one in ten.

It is a sufficiently terrible thought, however, that
there are even four kinds of reptiles going silently
about the land whose bite is certain death. If they
knew their powers and were maliciously disposed,
our life in the East would be like Christian’s progress
through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. But
the poisonous snakes are just as timid as the rest,
and as little inclined to act on the offensive’ against
any living creature except the little animals on
which they prey. Even a trodden worm will turn,
and a snake has as much spirit asa worm. If aman
treads on it, it will turn and bite him. But it has no

DEATH FROM SNAKE-BITE 105

desire to be trodden on. It does its best to avoid
that mischance, and, I need scarcely say, so does a
man unless he is drunk. When both parties are
sincerely anxious to avoid a collision, a collision
is not at all likely to occur, and the fact is that, of
all forms of death to which we are exposed in India,
death by snake-bite is about the one which we
have least reason to apprehend.

During a pretty long residence in India I have
heard of only one instance of an Englishman being
killed by a snake. It was in Manipur, and I read
of it in the newspapers. During the same time I
have heard of only one death by lightning and
one by falling into the fermenting vat of a brewery,
so I suppose these accidents are equally uncommon.
Eating oysters is much more fatal: I have heard of
at least four or five deaths from that cause.

The natives are far more exposed to danger from
snakes than we are, because they go barefoot, by
night as well as day, through fields and along narrow,
overgrown footpaths about their villages. The
tread of a barefooted man does not make noise
enough to warn a snake to get out of his way,
and if he treads on one, there is nothing between
its fangs and his skin. Again, the huts of the
natives, being made of wattle and daub and
thatched with straw, offer to snakes just the kind
of shelter that they like, and the wonder is that
naked men, sleeping on the ground in such places,
and poking about dark corners, among their stores

106 SNAKES

of fuel and other chattels, meet with so few accidents.
It says a great deal for the mild and inoffensive
nature of the snake. Still, the total number of
deaths by snake-bite reported every year is very
large, and looks absolutely appalling if you do not
think of dividing it among three hundred millions.
Treated in that way it shrivels up at once, and when
compared with the results of other causes of death,
looks quite insignificant.

The natives themselves are so far from regarding
the serpent tribe with our feelings that the deadliest
of them all has been canonised and is treated with
all the respect due to a sub-deity. No Brahmin,
or religious-minded man of any respectable caste,
will have a cobra killed on any account. If one
takes to haunting his premises, he will propitiate it
with offerings of silk and look for good luck from
its patronage.

About snakes other than the cobra the average
native concerns himself so little that he does not
know one from another by sight. They are all
classed together as janwar, a word which answers
exactly to the ‘‘ venomous beast’”’ of Acts xxviii. 4;
and though they are aware that some are deadly
and some are not, any particular snake that a sahib
has had the honour to kill is one of the deadliest as
a matter of course. I have never met a native who
knew that a venomous snake could be distinguished
by its fangs, except a few doctors and educated men
who have imbibed western science. In fact they do

REWARDS FOR DESTRUCTION 107

not think of the venom as a material substance
situated in the mouth. It is an effluence from the
entire animal, which may be projected at a man in
various ways, by biting him, or spitting at him,
or giving him a flick with the tail.

The Government of India spends a large sum of
money every year in rewards for the destruction of
snakes. This is one of those sacrifices to sentiment
which every prudent government offers. The senti-
ment to which respect is paid in this case is of course
British, not Indian. Indian sentiment is propitiated
by not levying any tax on dogs, so the pariah cur,
owned and disowned, in all stages of starvation,
mange and disease, infests every town and village,
lying in wait for the bacillus of rabies. Against
the one fatal case of snake-bite mentioned above, I
have known of at least half a dozen deaths among
Englishmen from the more horrible scourge of hydro-
phobia. In the steamer which brought me home
there were two private soldiers on their way to M.
Pasteur, at the expense, of course, of the British
Government.

Xx
THE INDIAN SNAKE-CHARMER

WE must wait for another month or two before we
can think of the winter in this country in the past
tense, but in India the month of March is the
beginning of the hot season, and the tourists who
have been enjoying the pleasant side of Anglo-
Indian life and assuring themselves that their exiled
countrymen have not much to grumble at will now
be making haste to flee.

During the month the various hotels of Bombay
will be pretty familiar with the grey sun-hat,
fortified with puggaree and pendent flap, which is
the sign of the globe-trotter in the East. And all
the tribe of birds of prey who look upon him as
their lawful spoil will recognise the sign from afar
and gather about him as he sits in the balcony
after breakfast, taking his last view of the gorgeous
East, and perhaps (it is to be feared) seeking inspira-
tion for a few matured reflections wherewith to
bring the forthcoming book to an impressive close.
The vendor of Delhi jewellery will be there and the
Sind-work-box-walla, with his small, compressed white

108

THE INDIAN MERCHANT 109

turban and spotless robes, and the Cashmere shawl
merchant and many more, pressing on the gentle-
man’s notice for the last time their most tempting
wares and preparing for the long bout of fence which
will decide at what point between ‘‘ asking price”
and “selling price’’ each article shall change
ownership. The distance between these two points
is wide and variable, depending upon the indications
of wealth about the purchaser’s person and the
indications of innocence about his countenance.
And when the poor globe-trotter, who has long
since spent more money than he ever meant to spend,
and loaded himself with things which he could have
got cheaper in London or New York, tries to shake
off his tormentors by getting up and leaning over
the balcony rails, the shrill voice of the snake-
charmer will assail him from below, promising him,
in a torrent of sonorous Hindustanee, variegated
with pigeon English and illuminated with wild
gesticulations, such.a superfine tamasha as it never
was the fortune of the sahib to witness before.
Tamasha is one of those Indian words, like
bundobust, for which there is no equivalent in the
English language, and which are at once so com-
prehensive and so expressive that, when once
the use of them has been acquired, they become
indispensable, so that they have gained a permanent
place in the Anglo-Indian’s vocabulary. It is not
slang, but a good word of ancient origin. Hobson-
Jobson quotes a curious Latin writer on the Empire

IIo THE INDIAN SNAKE-CHARMER

of the Grand Mogul, who uses it with a definition
appended, ‘‘ ut spectet Thamasham, id est pugnas
elephantorum, leonum, buffalorum et aliarum
ferarum.’”’ ‘‘Show”’ comes nearest it in English,
but falls far short of it.

The tamasha which the snake-charmer promises
the sahib will include serpent dances, a fight
between a cobra and a mungoose, the inevitable
mango tree, and other tricks of juggling. But to a
stranger the snake-charmer himself is a better
tamasha than anything he can show. He is indeed
a most extraordinary animal. His hair and beard
are long and unkempt, his general aspect wild, his
clothing a mixture of savagery and the wreckage
of civilisation. He wears a turban, of course, and
generally a large one; but it is put on without art,
just wound about his head anyhow, and hanging
lopsidedly over one ear. It and the loose cloth
wrapped about the middle of him are as dirty as
may be and truly Oriental, though erratic. But,
besides these, he wears a jacket of coloured calico,
or any other material, with one button fastened,
probably on the wrong buttonhole, and under
this, if the weather is cold, he may have a shirt
seemingly obtained from some Indian representa-
tive of Moses & Co.

On his shoulder he carries a long bamboo, from
the ends of which hang villainously shabby baskets,
some flat and round, occupied by snakes, others
large and oblong, filled with apparatus of jugglery.

RACE OR ORIGIN III

The members of his family, down to an unclothed,
precocious imp of ten, accompany him, carrying
similar baskets, or capacious wallets, or long, cylin-
drical drums, on which they play with their fingers.
The dramatic effect of the whole is enhanced when
one of them allows a huge python, a srake of the
Boa constrictor tribe, which kills its prey by crushing
it, to wind its hideous, speckled coils round his body.

What the snake-charmer is by race or origin
ethnologists may determine when they have done
with the gipsy. Heisnota Hindu. No particular
part of the country acknowledges him as its native.
He is to the great races, castes, and creeds of India
what the waif is to the billows of the sea. His
language, in public at least, is Hindustanee, but
this is a sort of lingua franca, the common property
of all the inhabitants of the country. His religion
is probably one of the many forms of demon worship
which grow rank on the fringes of Hinduism. He
must be classed, no doubt, with the other wandering
tribes which roam the country, camping under
umbrellas, or something little better, each conse-
crated to some particular form of common crime,
and each professing some not in itself dishonest occu-
pation, like the tinkering of gipsies.

But the snake-charmer is the best known and most
widely spread of them all. By occupation he is a
professor of three occult sciences. First, he is a
juggler, and in this art he has some skill. His
masterpiece is the famous mango trick, which

18

112 THE INDIAN SNAKE-CHARMER

consists in making a miniature mango tree grow
up in a few minutes, and even blossom and bear
fruit, out of some bare spot which he has covered
with his mysterious basket. It has been written
about by travellers in extravagant terms of astonish-
ment and admiration, but, as generally performed,
is an extremely clumsy-looking trick, though it is
undoubtedly difficult to guess how it is done. A
more blood-curdling feat is to put the unclothed
and precocious imp aforementioned under a large
basket, and then run a sword savagely through and
through every corner of it, and draw it out covered
with gore. When the sickened spectators are about
to lynch the murderer, the imp runs in smiling from
the garden gate.

The connection between these performances and
the man’s second trade, namely, snake-charming, is
not obvious to a Western mind; but it must be
remembered that the snake-charmer is not a mere,
vulgar juggler, amusing people with sleight-of-hand.
His feats are miracles, performed with the assistance
of superior powers. In short, he is a theosophist,
only his converse is not with excorporated Mahatmas
from Thibet, but with spirits of another grade,
whose Superior has been known from very remote
antiquity as an Old Serpent. In deference to this
respectable connection the cobra holds a distin-
guished place even in orthodox Hinduism. So it
is altogether fit that a performer of wonders should
be on intimate terms with the serpent tribe. The

THE POWER OF MUSIC 113

snake-charmer keeps all sorts of them, but chiefly
cobras. These he professes to charm from their
holes by playing upon an instrument which may
have some hereditary connection with the bagpipe,
for it has an air-reservoir consisting of a large gourd,
and it makes a most abominable noise. As soon
as the cobra shows itself the charmer catches it by
the tail with one hand, and, running the other
swiftly along its body, grips it firmly just behind
the jaws, so that it cannot turn and bite. Practice
and coolness make this an easy feat. Then the
poison fangs are pulled out with a pair of forceps
and the cobra is quite harmless. It is kept in a
round, flat basket, out of which, when the charmer
removes the lid and begins to play, it raises its
graceful head, and, expanding its hood, sways gently
in response to the music.

Scientific men aver that a snake has no ears and
cannot possibly hear the strains of the pipe, but
that sort of science simply spoils a picturesque
subject like the snake-charmer. So much is certain,
that all snakes cannot be played upon in this way:
there are some species which are utterly callous to
the influences to which the cobra yields itself so
readily. No missionary will find any difficulty in
getting a snake-charmer to appreciate that Scripture
text about the deaf adder which will not listen to the
voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.

To these two occupations the snake-charmer adds
that of a medicine man, for who should know the

II4 THE INDIAN SNAKE-CHARMER

occult potencies of herbs and trees so well as he?
So, as he wanders from village to village, he is wel-
comed as well as feared. But one wealthy tourist
is worth more to him than a whole village of ryots,
so he keeps his eye on every town in which he is
likely to fall in with the travelling white man. And
the travelling white man would be sorry to miss him,
for he is one of the few relics of an ancient state of
things which railways and telegraphs and the
Educational Department have left unchanged.

The itinerant jeweller and the Sind-work-box-walla
are unmistakably being left behind as the East hurries
after the West, and we shall soon know them no
more. Showy shops, where the inexperienced
traveller may see all the products of Sind and
Benares, and Cutch and Cashmere, spread before
him at fixed prices, are multiplying rapidly and
taking the bread from the mouth of the poor hawker.
But the snake-charmer seems safe from that kind
of competition. It is difficult to forecast a time
when a broad signboard in Rampart Row will
invite the passer-by to visit Mr. Nagshett’s world-
renowned Serpent Tamasha, Mungoose and Cobra
Fight, Mango-tree Illusion, etc. Entrance, one
rupee.

XI
CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE

In a little book on the snakes of India, published
many years ago by Dr. Nicholson of the Madras
Medical Service, the conviction was expressed that
the snake-charmers of Burmah knew of some anti-
dote to the poison of the cobra which gave them
confidence in handling it. He said that nothing
would induce them to divulge it, but that he sus-
pected it consisted in gradual inoculation with
the venom itself. Putting the question to himself
why he did not attempt to attest this by experi-
ment, he replied that there were two reasons, which,
if I recollect rightly, were, first, that he had a strong
natural repugnance to anything like cruelty to
animals, and, secondly, that he had observed that
as soon as a man got the notion into his head that
he had discovered a cure for snake-bite, he began to
show symptoms of insanity.

It is rather remarkable that, after so many years,
another Scottish doctor, not in Madras, but in
Edinburgh, has proved, by just such experiments
as Dr. Nicholson shrank from, that an “aged and

previously sedate horse”? may, by gradual inocula-
115

116 CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE

tion with cobra poison, be rendered so thoroughly
proof against it that a dose which would suffice to kill
ten ordinary horses only imparts “increased vigour
and liveliness” toit. Further, Dr. Fraser has found
that the serum of the blood of an animal thus
rendered proof against poison is itself an antidote
capable of combating that poison after it has been
at work for thirty minutes in the veins of a rabbit,
and arresting its effects. And all this has been
achieved without apparent detriment to the dis-
tinguished doctor’s sanity.

This must be intensely interesting intelligence to
Englishmen throughout India, and joyful intelli-
gence too, for, scoff as we may at the danger of
being bitten by a poisonous snake, nobody likes to
think that, if such a thing should happen to him
(and very narrow escapes sometimes remind us that
it may), there would be nothing for him to do but
to lie down and die. And so, ever since the Honour-
able East India Company was chartered, the anti-
dote to snake poison has been a sort of philosopher’s
stone, sought after by doctors and men of science
along many lines of investigation. And every now
and then somebody has risen up and announced
that he has found it, and has had disciples for a
season.

But one remedy after another, though it might
give startling results in the laboratory, has proved
to be useless in common life, and the majority of
Englishmen have long since resigned themselves to

ANTI-VENENE 117

the conclusion that there is no practical cure for
the bite of a poisonous snake. For what avails it
to carry about in your travelling bag a phial of
strong ammonia and to live in more jeopardy of
death by asphyxiation than you ever were by
snakes, unless you have some guarantee that, when
it is your fate to be bitten by a snake, the phial
will be at hand? For ammonia must act on the
venom before the venom has had time to act upon
you, or it will only add another pain to your end ;
and that gives only a few minutes to go upon. So
with nitric acid and every agent that operates by
neutralising the poison and not by counteracting its
effects. And this has been the character of all the
remedies hitherto put forward. ‘‘ They are,’ says
Sir Joseph Fayrer, ‘‘ absolutely without any specific
effect on the condition produced by the poison.”
But “ anti-venene,’ as Dr. Fraser calls his im-
munised blood-serum, follows the poison into the
system, even after the fatal symptoms have begun
to show themselves, and arrests them at once. So
the Anglo-Indian may throw away his ammonia
phial and, arming himself with another of anti-
venene and a hypodermic syringe, feel that he is safe
against an accident which will never happen. As
for the man who is not nervous, he will speak of the
new antidote, and think of it as most interesting
and valuable, and go on his way as before with no
expectation of ever being bitten by a venomous
snake. The medical man of every degree will

118 CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE

order a supply as soon as it is to be had, and con-
scientiously try to stamp out the smouldering hope
within him that somebody in the station will soon
be bitten by a cobra and give him a chance.
Among the dusky millions of India Dr. Fraser’s
discovery will create no “catholic ravishment”’
because they will not hear of it. And if they
did hear of it they would regard his labours as
misapplied and the result as superfluous. For the
Hindu has never shared the Englishman’s opinion
that there is no cure for snake-bite. On the con-
trary, he is assured that there are not one or two
but many specifics for the bite of every kind of
snake, known to those whose business it is to know
them. If they are not invariably efficacious, it is
for the simple reason that if a man’s time has come
to die he will die. But if his time has not come to
die they will not fail to cure him, and since no man
can know when he is bitten whether his time has
come or not, he will lay the odds against Fate by
trying, not one or another of them, but as many as
he can hear of or get. Some of them are drastic
in their effects, and so it too often proves that the
poor man’s time has indeed come, for though he
might survive the snake he succumbs to the cure.
It is many years now since the news was brought
to me one day that a man whom I knew very well
had been bitten by a deadly serpent and was dying.
He was a fine, strongly built young fellow, a Moham-
medan, in the employ of a Parsee liquor distiller,

THE DEADLY CURE 11g

in whose godown he was arranging firewood when
he was bitten in the foot. Without looking at the
snake he rushed out and, falling on his face on the
ground, implored the bystanders to take care of his
wife and children as he was a dead man. The news
spread and all the village ran together. The man
was taken to an open room in his employer’s premises
and vigorous measures for his recovery were set on
foot, in which his employer’s family and servants,
his own friends and as many of the general public
as chose to look in, were allowed to take part.

First of all, some jungle men were called in, for
the man of the jungle must naturally know more
about snakes than other men. These were probably
Katkurrees, an aboriginal race, who live by wood-
cutting, hunting and other sylvan occupations.
They proved to be practical men and at once sucked
the wound. An intelligent Havildar of the Customs
Department, who chanced to be present, then lanced
the wound slightly to let the blood flow, and tied
the leg tightly in two places above it. This was
admirable. If what the jungle men and the Havildar
did were always and promptly done whenever a man
is bitten by a snake, few such accidents would end
fatally.

But this poor man’s friends did not stop there.
A supply of chickens had been procured with all
haste, and these were scientifically applied. This
is a remedy in which the natives have great faith,
and I have known Europeans who were convinced

19

120 CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE

of its efficacy. The manner of its application
scarcely admits of description in these pages, but the
effect is that the chickens absorb the poison and
die, while the man lives, The number of chickens
required is a gauge of the virulence of the serpent,
for as soon as the venom is all extracted they cease
to die. Nobody, however, could tell me how many
chickens perished in this case. They were all too
busy to stop and note the result of one remedy while
another remained untried. And there were many
et,

i Somebody suggested that the venom should be
dislodged from the patient’s stomach, so an emetic
was administered in the form of a handful of common
salt, with immediate and seismic effect. Then a
decoction of neem leaves was poured down the man’s
throat. The neem tree is an enemy of all fevers
and a friend of man generally, so much so that it
is healthful to sleep under its shade. Therefore a
decoction of the leaves could not fail to be beneficial
in one way or another. The residue of the leaves
was well rubbed into the crown of the man’s head
for more direct effect on the brains in case they
might be affected. Something else was rubbed in
under the root of the tongue.

In the meantime a man with some experience in
exorcism had brought twigs of a tree of well-ascer-
tained potency in expelling the devil, and advised
that, in view of the known connection between
serpents and Satan, it would be well to try beating

THE SAD END rar

the patient with these. The advice was taken, and
many stripes were laid upon him. Massage was also
tried, and other homely expedients, such as bandaging
and thumping with the fists, were not neglected.

It was about noon when I was told of the accident,
and I went down at once and found the poor man
in a woeful state, as well he might be after such
rough handling as he had suffered for four consecu-
tive hours; but he was quite conscious and there
was neither pain nor swelling in the bitten foot.
I remonstrated most vigorously, pointing out that
the snake, which nobody had seen, might not have
been a venomous one at all, that there were no
symptoms of poisoning, except such as might also
be explained by the treatment the man had suffered
at the hands of his friends, and that, in short, I
could see no reason to think he was going to die
unless they were determined to kill him.

My words appeared to produce a good effect on
the Parsees at least, and they consented to stop
curing the man and let him rest, giving him such
stimulating refreshment as he would take, for he
was a pious Mussulman and would not touch wine
or spirits. I said what I could to cheer him up,
and went away hoping that I had saved a human
life. Alas! In an hour or so a friend came in
with a root of rare virtue and persuaded the man
to swallow some preparation of it. Post hoc,
whether propier hoc I dare not say, he became un-
conscious and sank. Before night he was buried.

122 CURES FOR SNAKE-BITE

All this did not happen in some obscure village
in a remote jungle. It happened within a mile and
a half of a town controlled by a municipal corpora-
tion which enjoys the rights and privileges of
“local self-government.” In that town there was
a dispensary, with a very capable assistant-surgeon
in charge, and in that dispensary I doubt not you
would have found a bottle of strong liquor ammonia
and a printed copy of the directions issued by a
paternal Government for the recovery of persons
bitten by venomous serpents. But when the man
was bitten the one thing which occurred to nobody
was to take him there, and when I heard of the
matter the assistant-surgeon had just left for a dis-
tant place, passing on his way the gate of the house
in which the man lay. This was a bad case, but
there is little reason to hope that it was altogether
exceptional. JI am afraid there can be no question
at all that hundreds of the deaths put down to
snake-bite by village punchayets every year might
with more truth be registered as ‘‘ cured to death.”

XII
THE COBRA BUNGALOW
A STORY OF A MONEYLENDER

BEHARILAL SURAJMUL was the greatest money-
lender in Dowlutpoor. He was a man of rare talents.
He remembered the face of every man who had at
any time come to borrow money of him since he
began to work, as a little boy, in his father’s office,
so that it was impossible to deceive him. He had
also such a miraculous skill in the making out of
accounts that a poor man who had come to him in
extremity for a loan of fifty rupees, to meet the
expenses of his daughter’s marriage, might go on
making payments for the remainder of his life
without reducing the debt by one rupee. In fact,
it seemed to increase with each payment.

And if the matter went into court, Beharilal never
failed to show that there was still a balance due to
him much larger than the original loan. But so
courteous and pleasant was the Seth in his manner
to all that such matters never went into court until
the right time, of which he was an infallible judge,

for he knew the private affairs of every family in
123

124 THE COBRA BUNGALOW

Dowlutpoor. Then a decree was obtained and the
debtor’s house, or land, was sold to defray the debt,
Beharilal himself being usually the purchaser,
though not, of course, in his own name, for he was a
prudent man.

By these means Beharilal had become possessed
of large estates, which he managed with such skill
that they yielded to him revenues which they had
never yielded to the former owners of them, while
his tenants, who were mostly former owners, grew
daily more deeply involved in their pecuniary
obligations to him, and therefore entertained no
thought of leaving him, for he could put them
into prison any day if he chose. Their contentment
gave him great satisfaction, and he treated them
with benevolence, giving them advances of money
for all their necessary expenses and appropriating
the whole of their crops at the harvest to repay
himself. He bound them to buy all that they had
need of at his shop, so that he made profit off them
on both sides.

And as his wealth increased, his person increased
with it and his appearance became more imposing,
so that he was regarded everywhere with the highest
respect and esteem. He was, moreover, a very
religious man and charitable beyond most. By
early risers he might be seen in his garden seeking
out the nests of ants and giving them, with his own
hands, their daily dole of rice. It was his benevolent
thoughtfulness which had supplied drinking troughs

BEHARILAL I25

for the flocks of pigeons that continually plundered
the stores of the other grain merchants. He had
also established a pinjrapole for aged, sickly and
ownerless animals of all kinds. To this he required
all his tenants to send their bullocks when they
became unfit for work, and he sold them new cattle,
good and strong, at prices fixed by himself. If any
of his old debtors, when reduced to beggary, came
to his door for alms, they were never sent away
without a handful of rice or a copper coin. He
kept a bag of the smallest copper coins always at
hand for such purposes.

Beharilal had a fine house, designed by himself
and surrounded by a vast garden stocked with
mangoes, guavas, custard apples, oranges and other
fruit trees, and made beautiful and fragrant with all
manner of flowers. The cool shade drew together
birds of many kinds from the dry plains of the sur-
rounding country, and it pleased Beharilal to think
that they also were recipients of his bounty and that
the benefits which he conferred on them would
certainly be entered to the credit of his account
with Heaven.

Some he fed, such as the crows, which flocked
about the back door, like a convocation of Christian
padres, in the morning and afternoon, when the ladies
of his family gave out their portion of boiled rice
and ghee. The pigeons also came together in
hundreds in an open space under the shade of a
noble peepul tree, where grain was thrown out for

126 THE COBRA BUNGALOW

them at three o’clock every day ; and among them
were many chattering sparrows and not a few
green parrots, which walked quaintly among the
bustling pigeons, their long tails moving from side
to side like the pointer of the scale on which the
Bunia weighed his rupees. This resemblance struck
him as he reclined against the fat red cushion in
his verandah summing up his gains. There were
other birds which would not eat his food, but found
abundance, suited to their respective castes, among
the shrubs and trees that he had planted. Mynas
walked eagerly on the lawns looking for grass-
hoppers, glittering sunbirds hovered over the flowers,
thrusting their slender bills into each nectar-laden
blossom, bulbuls twittered among the mulberries
and the koel made the shady banian tree resound
with its melodious notes.

In a remote corner of the garden, under the dark
shade of a tamarind, there stood a small shrine, like
a whitewashed tomb, with a niche or recess on one
side of it containing a conical stone smeared with
red ochre. Some called it Mahadeo and some Khan-
doba, but no one could explain the presence of a
Mahratta god in a Bunia’s garden in Dowlutpoor,
except by quoting an old tradition about one
Narayen who had come from the Mahratta country
and lived for many years in this place. Some said
he was a prosperous goldsmith of great piety, but
others maintained that he was a Sunyasee, or saint,
and there was no certainty in the matter. The one

THE SACRED COBRA 127

point on which all were agreed was the great sanctity
of the shrine, and Beharilal was most careful to
perform at it every ceremony which custom, or
tradition, sanctioned for placating the god and
averting any calamity that might arise from his
displeasure.

At the base of one of the old cracked walls of the
shrine there was a hole which was the den of a very
large, black cobra. Several times it had been seen
in the garden, and, when pursued, had glided into
this hole and escaped. When Beharilal first heard
of it he was much troubled in his mind, but,
having consulted a Brahmin, he gave strict injunc-
tions that the reptile should not be molested, and
since that time he had never failed to place an
offering of milk near to the hole in the morning
and in the evening.

Now it happened that at this time there was in
Dowlutpoor an English doctor who was generally
known as the Jadoo-walla Saheb, because he was
believed to practise sorcery and had some mysterious
need of snakes. Perhaps he was only making
experiments with their venom. At any rate, he
wanted live cobras and offered a good price for them.
So when Nagoo, the snake-charmer, heard that there
was a large one in Beharilal’s garden, he thought he
might do good business by capturing it for the
Jadoo-walla Saheb, and at the same time demanding
a reward from the timorous Bunia for ridding him
of such a dangerous neighbour. With this intent he

20

128 THE COBRA BUNGALOW

repaired to the garden with all the apparatus of
his art, his flat snake baskets, his mongoose and
his crooked pipe. Having reconnoitred the ground,
he commenced operations by sitting down on his
hams and producing such ear-splitting strains from
the crooked pipe as might have charmed Cerberus
to leave his kennel at the gate of hell. Great was
his surprise and mortification when he heard the
voice of Beharilal raised in tones of unwonted
passion and saw a stalwart Purdaisee advancing
towards him armed with an iron-bound lathee, who,
without ceremony, nay, with abusive epithets,
hustled him and all his gear out of the garden.
Nagoo was a snake-charmer and by nature a gipsy,
and this treatment rankled in his dark bosom.
Some weeks passed and the sun had scarcely
risen when Beharilal sat in the ota in front of his
house at his daily business, which began as soon
as his teeth were cleaned and ended about eleven
at night. The place was not tidy. Two or three
mats were spread on the floor, a spare one was rolled
up in a corner, several pairs of shoes were on the
steps, umbrellas leaned against the wall, handles
downwards, and a large chatty of drinking water
stood beside them. The Bunia himself, bare-
headed and bare-footed, sat cross-legged on a
cushion, with a wooden stool in front of him, on
which lay an open ledger of stout yellowish paper,
bound in soft red leather and nearly two feet in
length. In this he was carefully entering yesterday’s

THE DISASTER 129

transactions with a reed pen, which he dipped fre-
quently in a brass inkpot filled with a sponge soaked
in a muddy black fluid.

Beside him sat his son, aged two years, playing
with the red, lacquered cylinder in which he kept
his reed pens. Beharilal had two girls also, but
they were with the women folk in the interior of
the house, where he was content they should stay.
This was his only boy, the pride and joy of his
heart. Engrossed as he was in recording his gains,
he could not refrain from lifting his eyes now and
again to feast them on that rotund little body, like
a goblet set on two pillars. No clothing concealed
the tense and shiny brown skin, but there were
silver bracelets on the fat wrists and massive anklets
where deep creases divided the fat little feet from
the fat little legs, and a representation, in chased
silver, of Eve’s fig leaf hung from a silver chain
which encircled the sphere that should have been
his waist. His globular head was curiously shaven.
From two deep pits between the bulging brow and
the fat cheeks that nearly squeezed out the little
nose between them, two black diamonds twinkled,
full of wonder, as the small purse mouth prattled to
itself softly and inarticulately of the mysteries of life.

Suddenly a startled cry, passing into a prolonged
wail of fear, roused old Beharilal, and he saw a sight
that nearly caused him to swoon with terror. The
little man, a moment ago so placid and happy, was
shrinking back with ‘“‘I don’t like that thing”

130 THE COBRA BUNGALOW

inscribed in lines of anguish on his distorted face,
and not three feet from him a huge cobra, just
emerged from the roll of matting, eyed him with a
stony stare, its head raised and its hood expanded.
Its quivering tongue flickered out from between
its lips like distant flashes of forked lightning.

For a moment Beharilal stood stupefied, then all
the heroism that was in him spent itself at once.
Seizing the heavy wooden stool in both his hands,
he raised it high over his head and dashed it down
on the reptile. The sharp edge of hard wood broke
its back, and as it wriggled and lashed about, biting
at everything within reach, the Bunia snatched up
his boy and waddled into the house at a pace to
which he had long been unaccustomed, calling out,
in frantic gasps, for help. A rush of excited and
screaming women met him in the inner court, and
he dropped his precious burden, with pious ejacu-
lations, into the arms of its mother, and stood
panting and speechless. Then calling aloud to
know if all danger was past, he ventured cautiously
out again and saw that the Purdaisee and the Malee
had ejected the wriggling cobra and were pounding
its head into a jelly with a big stone.

For some seconds he looked on in a strange
stupor, and then he realised what he had done. He,
Beharilal, the Bunia, who had always removed the
insects so tenderly from his own person that they
were not hurt, who had never committed the sin of
killing a mosquito or a fly ; he, with his own hands,

THE COBRA’S MATE 131

had taken the life of the guardian cobra of the
shrine! ‘Urray-ray! Bap-ray!” he cried, “for
what demerit of mine has this ill-luck befallen me
in my old age? What will happen now?’’

“Nay, Sethjkee,” said the Malee, “‘ be not afraid.
It was in your destiny that this offspring of Satan
should come to its end by your hand. We have
pounded its head properly, so it will not return to
you.”’

“But what of its mate?” said Beharilal. ‘I
have heard that, if any man kills a cobra, its mate
will follow him by day and by night until it has
had its revenge. Is that not so?”

The Malee answered, ‘‘Chh, Chh! There is no
mate of this cobra,’’ but his tone was not confident.

“Go,” cried Beharilal—‘‘ go quickly and call
Nagoo, the snake-charmer. He has knowledge.”

“JT will go,’’ said the Malee, and set off at a run;
but when he got out of the gate he lapsed into a
leisurely walk, for why should a man lose his breath
without cause? In time he found his way to the
little settlement of huts constructed of poles and
mats, where Nagoo sat on the ground smoking his
“ chillum,’’ and told his errand.

“Why should I come?” was Nagoo’s reply ; “I
went to take away that cobra and the Bunia drove
me from the garden with abuse. Why does he send
for me now?”’

“ Heis a Bunia,” said the Malee, as if that summed
up the whole matter ; but he added, after a pause,

132 THE COBRA BUNGALOW

“Tf he sees a burning ground, he shakes like a peepul
leaf. The cobra has died by his hand and his liver
has become like water. Whatever you ask he will
give. You should come.’’

Nagoo replied aloud, ‘‘I will come,’”’ and to him-
self, ‘‘I will give him physic.’ Then he took up
his baskets and his pipe and followed the Malee.

Beharilal proceeded to business with a directness
foreign to his habit, looking over his shoulder at
intervals lest a snake might be silently approaching.
‘““Good Nagoo,” he said, ‘“‘a great misfortune has
happened. The cobra of the shrine has been killed.
Has it a mate?”’

‘“‘ How can a cobra not have a mate?”’ answered
Nagoo curtly.

Then Beharilal employed the most insinuating of
the many tones of his voice. ‘‘ Listen, Nagoo. You
are a man of skill. Capture that cobra and I will
pay you well. I will give you five rupees.” Then,
observing no response in the wrinkled visage of the
charmer, “‘I will give you ten rupees.”

Nagoo would have sold his revenge for a tithe of
the wealth thus dangled before him, but he saw no
reason to suppose that there was another cobra
anywhere in the garden, so he answered with the
calm confidence of an expert, ‘‘ That cannot be
done. The serpent will not heed any pipe now.
In its mind there is only revenge.”

“Then what will it do?’’ said the trembling
Bunia.

FEAR AND FLIGHT 133

“Tf its mate died by the hand of a man, it will
follow that man until it has accomplished its
purpose.”

“But how will it know,’ asked Beharilal, ‘“ by
whose hand its mate died?”

Nagoo replied with pious simplicity, ‘How can
I tell by what means it knows? God informs it.”

“But,” pleaded Beharilal, “is there no escape ?
—if a man goes away by the railway or by water ?’’

Nagoo pondered for a moment and said, “If a
man crossed the sea, the serpent would be baulked.
If he goes by railway it will not leave him. Let
him go to Madras, it will find him.”

With a faltering hand the Bunia put some rupees,
uncounted, into the charmer’s skinny palm, saying,
“Go, make incantations. Do something. There is
great knowledge of mysteries with you”; and he
hurried back into the house.

His arrangements were very soon made. His
account books, with a bundle of bonds and hoondies
and cash and his son, were put into a small cart
drawn by a pair of fast trotting bullocks, into which
he himself climbed, after looking under the cushion
to see that there was no evil beast lurking there,
and got away in haste while the sun was yet hot.
The rest of the family followed with the household
property, and in a few days the house was empty
and only the Malee remained in charge. Many years
have passed and the house is empty still, and the
Malee, grown grey and frail, is still in charge. He

134 THE COBRA BUNGALOW

gets no wages, but he sells the jasmine flowers and
the mangoes and guavas, and he grows chillies
and brinjals, and so fills the stomachs of himself
and his little grandson and is contented. If you
ask him where the Seth has gone, he replies, ‘‘ Who
knows?’’ His debt has gone with his creditor, ‘“ gone
glimmering through the dream of things that were,”
and he has no desire to recall them.

A civil or military officer from the station, taking
a solitary walk, sometimes finds himself at the Cobra
Bungalow, and turns in to wander among its old
trees and unswept paths, obstructed by overgrown
and untended shrubs, and wonders how it got its
name. Then he pauses at the whitewashed shrine
and notes that the god-stone has been freshly painted
red and that chaplets of faded flowers lie before it.
But the old Malee approaches with a meek salaam
and a posy of jasmine and marigolds and warns
him that there is a cobra in the shrine.

XIII
THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

IT was January 13 of a good many years ago, in
those happy days that have “gone glimmering
through the dream of things that were.’ The sun
had scarcely risen, and I was sitting in the cosy
cabin of my yacht enjoying my ‘“‘chota hazree,”
which, being interpreted, means “lesser presence,”
and in Anglo-Indian speech signifies an ‘“‘ eye-opener ”
of tea and toast—the greater presence appears some
hours later and we call it breakfast. I will not say
that the view from my cabin windows was enchant-
ing. The placid waters of the broad creek would
have been pleasant to look upon if the level rays of
the sun in his strength had not skimmed them with
such a blinding glare, but the low, flat-topped hills
that bounded them were forbidding.

The people said truly that God had made this a
country of stones, but they forgot that He had
clothed the stones with trees of evergreen foliage
and a dense undergrowth of shrubs and grass, to
protect and hold together the thick bed of loam
which the fallen leaves enriched from year to year.
It was the axes of their fathers that felled the trees,

2I 135

136 THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

to sell for fuel, and the billhooks of their mothers
that hacked away the bushes and grubbed up their
very roots to burn on the household cooking hole.
Then the torrential rains of the south-west monsoon
came down on the naked, defenceless, parched and
cracked soil and swept it in muddy cascades down
to the sea, leaving flats of bare rock, strewn thick
with round stones, sore to the best-shod foot of man
and cruel to the hoofs of a horse. About and among
the huts of the unswept and malodorous hamlet
just above the shore there were fine trees, mango,
tamarind, babool and bor, showing what might
have been elsewhere.

On the rounded top of the highest hill frowned in
black ruin an old Mahratta fort, covered on the top
and sides and choked within by that dense mass
of struggling vegetation which always takes posses-
sion of old forts in India. The weather-worn stones
and crumbling mortar seem to feed the trees to
gluttony. First some bird drops the seeds of the
banian fig into crevices of the ramparts, and its
insidious roots push their way and grow and grow
into great tortuous snakes, embracing the massive
blocks of basalt, heaving them up and holding them
up, so that they cannot fall. Then prickly shrubs
and thorny trees follow, fighting for every inch of
ground, but quite unable to eject the gently persistent
custard-apple, descended doubtless from seeds which
the garrison dropped as they ate the luscious fruit,
on account of which the Portuguese introduced the

MEMORY OF A TRAGEDY 137

tree from South America. I had penetrated into that
fort and had seen something of the snakes and birds
of night, but not the ghosts and demons which I was
assured made it their habitation by day.

On a level place a little below the fort stood two
monuments, telling of the days when the Honour-
able East India Company maintained a “‘ Resident”’
at this place. Here he lived in proud solitude, up-
holding the British flag. But his wife and the little
one on whose face he had not yet looked were on
their way from Bombay in a native “ pattimar”’ to
join him, and as he stood gazing over the sea at the
red setting sun one 5th of October, he thought of
the glad to-morrow and the end of his dreary lone-
liness. It fell to him to put up one of these monu-
ments, with a sorrowful inscription to all that was
left to him on the following morning, the “‘ memory ’’
of a beloved wife and an infant thirty-one days old,
drowned in crossing the bar on October 6, 1853.

We have strewed our best to the weeds unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.

If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid in full.

I carried my gun and rifle with me in my yacht.
They served to keep up my character as asportsman,
and did not often require to be cleaned. So the
morning calm of my mind was lashed into an un-
wonted tempest of excitement when my jolly skipper,
Sheikh Abdul Rehman, came in and told me briefly
that a “bag’’ (which word does not rhyme with

138 THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

rag, but must be pronounced like barg without the
y and signifies a tiger or panther) had killed a cow
in the village the night before last.

When he added that the villagers had set a spring
gun for it last evening and it had returned to the
“ kill’? and been badly wounded, my excitement
was turned into wrath. I had been at anchor here
all yesterday. The Indian ryot everywhere turns
instinctively to the sahib as his protector against
all wild beasts. What did these men mean by
keeping their own counsel and setting an infernal
machine for their enemy? Abdul Rehman ex-
plained, and the explanation was simple andsufficient.
My fat predecessor in the appointment that I held
had no relish for sport and kept no guns, so the
simple villagers, when they saw my boat with its
familiar flag, looked for no help from that quarter.
However, I might still win renown off that wounded
“bag,” if it was not a myth; but, to tell the truth,
I was sceptical. The tiger and the panther are not
nomads on rocky plains, like the antelope. I
landed, notwithstanding, promptly and visited the
scene. Sure enough, there was a young heifer lying
on its side, with the unmistakable deep pits where
the jaws of the panther had gripped its throat, and a
gory cavity where it had selected a gigot for its dinner.

Round the corpse the villagers had arranged a
circular fence of thorns, with one opening, across
which they had stretched a cord, attached at the
other end to the trigger of an old shooting iron of

“GONE TO THE FORT ” 139

some sort, charged with slugs and looking hard at
the opening. The gun had gone off during the night,
and the ground was soaked with blood. A few yards
off there was another great swamp of blood. The
beast had staggered away and lain down for a while,
faint and sick. Then it had got up and crawled
home, still dripping with blood, by which we tracked
it for a good distance, but the trace grew gradually
fainter and at last ceased altogether.

“Tt has gone to the fort,’ said the men—‘ bags
always go to the fort.’ I pointed out that, if it
had meant to go to the fort, it would have gone
towards the fort, instead of in another direction ;
but the argument did not move them. “The fort
is a jungle, and where else should a ‘bag’ take
refuge but in a jungle ?”’ However, I was obstinate,
and pursued the original direction until we arrived
at the brow of the hill, where it sloped steeply down
to the sea. The whole slope, for half a mile, was
covered with a dense scrub of Lantana bushes. This
is another plant introduced in some by-gone century
from South America, and planted first in gardens for
its profuse clusters of red and pink verbena-like
blossoms (it is a near relation of the garden verbena),
whence it has spread like the rabbit in New Zealand,
and become a nuisance. ‘‘ There,’ I cried, pointing
at the scrub, “there, without doubt, your wounded
‘bag’ is lying.”

Some of the men, unbelieving still, were amusing
themselves by rolling large stones down the slope,

140 THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

when suddenly there was a sound of scrambling, and
across an opening in the scrub, in sight of us all,
a huge hyena scurried away “on three legs.’’ I sent
a man post-haste for my rifle, which I had not
brought with me, never expecting to require it until
a regular campaign could be arranged. As soon as
it arrived, we formed in line and advanced, throw-
ing stones in all directions.

Make no offering of admiration at the shrine of
our hardihood, for we were in no peril. Among
carnivorous beasts there is not a more contemptible
poltroon than the hyena, even when wounded. A
friend of mine once tied up a billy goat as a bait
for a panther and sat up over it in a tree. In the
middle of the night a hyzena nosed it from afar, and
came sneaking up in the rear, for hyenas love the
flesh of goats next to that of dogs. But the goat
saw it, and, turning about bravely, presented his
horned front. This the hyena could not find
stomach to face. For two hours he manceuvred
to take the goat in rear, but it turned as he circled,
and stood up to him stoutly till the dawn came, and
my friend cut short its disreputable career with a
bullet.

To return to my story, we had not gone far when,
on a lower level, not many yards from me, I was
suddenly confronted by that repulsive, ghoulish
physiognomy which can never be forgotten when
once seen, the smoky-black snout, broad forehead
and great upstanding ears. Instantly the beast

THE HYANA KILLED I4I

wheeled and scrambled over a bank, receiving a
hasty rear shot which, as I afterwards found, left
it but one limb to go with, for the bullet passed
clean through a hindleg and lodged in a foreleg. It
went on, however, and some time passed before I
descried it far off dragging itself painfully across an
open space. A careful shot finished it, and it died
under a thick bush, where we found it and dragged
it out. It proved to be a large male, measuring
4 feet 7 inches, from which something over a foot
must be deducted for its shabby tail.

The natives all maintained still that their cow
had been killed by a panther, saying that the
hyzna had come on the second night, after their
manner, to fill its base belly with the leavings. And
there was some circumstantial evidence in favour
of this view. In the first place, I never heard of a
hyena having the audacity to attack a cow; in
the second, the tooth-marks on the cow showed that
it had been executed according to the tradition of
all the great cats—by seizing its throat and breaking
its neck; and in the third, a hyena, sitting down
to such a meal, would certainly have begun with
calf’s head and crunched up every bone of the skull
before thinking of sirloin or rumpsteak. But the
absurdity of a panther being found in such a region
outweighed all this and I scoffed.

I was yet to learn a lesson in humility out of this
adventure. Two years later I sailed over the bar
and dropped anchor at the same spot. I was met

142 THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

with the intelligence that on the previous evening
two panthers had been seen sitting on the brow of
the hill and gazing at the beauties of the fading
sunset, as wild beasts are so fond of doing. A night
or two later a cow was attacked in a neighbouring
field, and, staggering into the village, fell down and
died in a narrow alley between two houses. The
panther followed and prowled about all night, but
the villagers, hammering at their doors with sticks,
scared it from its meal.

I at once had a nest put up in a small tree, and
took my position in it at sunset. The common
people in India do not waste much money on lamp
oil, preferring to sleep during the hours appointed
by Nature for the purpose, so it was not long before
all doors were securely barred and quietness reigned.
Then the mosquitoes awoke and came to inquire
for me, the little bats (how I blessed them !) wheeled
about my head, the night-jar called to his fellow,
and the little owls sat on a branch together and
talked to each other about me. Hour after hour
passed, and it became too dark in that narrow alley
to see a panther if it had come. So I came down
and got to my boat. The panther was engaged a
mile away dining on another cow! On further
inquiry I learned that there was some good forest
a day’s journey distant, and it was quite the fashion
among the panthers of that place to spend a week-
end occasionally at a spot so full of all delights as
this dark, jungle-smothered fort.

XIV
THE PURBHOO

I po not believe that the Member of Parliament who
moved the adjournment of the House to consider the
culpable carelessness of the Government of India in
allowing the Rajah of Muttighur to fall into the
moat of his own castle when he was drunk, could
have told you what a Purbhoo is, not though you
had spelled it Prabhu, so that he could find it in his
Gazetteer. Of course he saw hundreds of them
during that Christmas which he spent in the East
before he wrote his book ; but then he took them all
for Brahmins. He never noticed that the curve of
their turbans was not the same, and the idol mark
on their foreheads was quite different, nor even that
their shoes were not forked at the toes, but ended
in a sharp point curled upwards. And if he did not
see these things which were on the surface, what
could he know of matters that lie deeper ?

Now the first and most important thing to be
known respecting the Purbhoo, the fundamental
fact of him, is that he is not a Brahmin. If he were
a Brahmin, one essential piece of our administrative
apparatus in India would be wanting, and without

22 143

oa

144 THE PURBHOO

it the whole machinery would assuredly go out of
order. Nor is it easy to see how we could replace
him. Not one of the other castes would serve cven
as a makeshift. They are all too far removed from
the Brahmin. But the Purbhoo is near him, irri-
tatingly near him, and he has proved in practice to
be just the sort of homceopathic remedy we require,
the counter-irritant, the outward blister by wise
application of which we can keep down the internal
inflammation.

In speaking of the Brahmin as an inflammation
in the body politic I disown all offensive and
invidious implications. Iam only using a convenient
simile. You may reverse it if you like and make
the disease stand for the Purbhoo, in which case
the Brahmin will be the blister. Which way fits
the facts best will depend upon which caste chances
at the time to be nearest to the vitals of Government.

The case stands thus. Before the days of British
rule the Brahmin was the priest and man of letters,
the ‘“clerke” in short. The rajahs and chiefs
were much of the same mind as old Douglas :

Thanks to Saint Bothan son of mine,
Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line,

Gawain being a bishop. As a Mohammedan gentle-
man related to one of the ruling Indian princes put
the matter when speaking to me a few years ago,
“In those days none of us could write. Our pen
was the sword. If any writing had to be done the

SECULAR AND REGULAR BRAHMIN 145

Brahmin was called in.’ And no doubt he did
excellent service, being diligent, astute, and withal
pliant and diplomatic. If to these qualities he
added ambition, he might, and often did, become a
Cardinal Wolsey in the state. In Poona, for example,
the Brahmin Prime Minister gradually overshadowed
the Mahratta king, and the descendant of Shivajee
was put on a back shelf as Rajah of Sattara, while
the Peishwa ruled at the capital.

Of course this carnal advancement was not gained
without some sacrifice of his spiritual character,
and the ‘secular’? Brahmin had to bow, quoad
sacra, to the penniless Bhut, or ‘‘ regular’? Brahmin,
who, refusing to contaminate his sanctity by doing
any kind of work, ate of the temple, or lived by royal
bounty or private charity, and by the free breakfasts
without which a marriage, “‘ thread ceremony”’ or
funeral in a gentleman’s house could not be respect-
ably celebrated. Idleness and sanctity are a
powerful combination, and it is written in the
shastras that every day in which a holy man does
no work for his bread, but lives by begging, is equal
in the eyes of the gods to a day spent in fasting ;
so, though the prospect of power and wealth might
tempt a few restless and wayward spirits, the great
mass of the Brahmin caste clung to the sacred calling.

All this time the Purbhoo was in the land, but
insignificant. He had no sacred calling. Tradition
assigned him a hybrid origin. He could not presume
to be a warrior, because his mother was a shoodra,

146 THE PURBHOO

nor could he condescend to be a farmer, for his
father was a kshutriya. So the gods had given
him the pen, and he was a writer—not a secretary,
but a humble quill-driver. But when the Portu-
guese and then the British came upon the scene,
not ruling by word of mouth, like the native rajahs,
but inditing their orders and keeping records, the
Purbhoo saw an open door and went in.

Then the Brahmin woke up, for he saw that he
was in evil case. The spirit of the British raj was
falling like a blight and a pestilence upon the means
by which he had lived, drying up the fountains of
religious revenue and slowly but surely blighting
the luxuriance of that pious liberality which always
took the form of feeding holy men. He found that
he must work for his bread whether he liked it or
not, and the only implement of secular work that
would not soil his priestly hand was the pen. And
this was already taken up by the Purbhoo, who
carried himself haughtily under the new régime and
showed no mind to make way for the holier man.
Hence sprang those bitter enmities and jealousies
which have done so much to lighten the difficulties
of our position.

The British Government has often been accused
of acting on the maxim, Divide et impera. It isa
libel. We do not divide, for there is no need.
Division is already there. We have only to
rejoice and rule. How well and justly we rule all
the world knows, but only the initiated know how

DIVIDE ET IMPERA 147

much we owe to the fact that the talents and
energies which would otherwise be employed in
thwarting our just intentions and phlebotomising
the ryot are largely preoccupied with the more
useful work of thwarting and undermining each
other.

What could a collector do single-handed against
a host of clerks and subordinate magistrates and
petty officials of every grade, all armed with the
awfulness of a heaven-born sanctity, all hedged
round with the prestige of an ancient supremacy,
endowed with a mole-like genius for underground
work which the Englishman never fathoms, and
all leagued together to suck to the uttermost the
life blood of those inferior castes which were created
expressly for their advantage ?

He is working in a foreign language, among customs
and ways of thought which it takes a lifetime to
understand: ¢hey are using their mother tongue
and handling matters that they have known from
childhood. He cannot tell a lie and is ashamed to
deceive: ¢hey are trained in a thrifty policy which
saves the truth for a last resort in case everything
else should fail. He would be helpless in their hands
as a sucking child. But he knows they will do for
him what he cannot do for himself. The Purbhoo
will lie in wait for the Brahmin, and the Brahmin
will keep his lynx eye on the Purbhoo. And woe
to the one who trips first. So the collector arranges
his men with judicious skill to the fostering of each

148 THE PURBHOO

other’s virtue, and the result is most gratifying.
The country blesses his administration, and his
subordinates are equally surprised and delighted at
their own integrity.

I speak of a wise and able administrator. There
are men in the Indian Civil Service who are neither
wise nor able, and some who are not administrators
at all, having most unhappily mistaken their voca-
tion. When such a one becomes collector of a
district his chitnis, or chief secretary, sees that that
tide in the affairs of men has come which, “ taken
at the flood, leads on to fortune,’’ and his caste-
fellows all through the service are filled with unholy
joy. But he does nothing rash or hasty. Wilily
and patiently he goes to work to make his own
foundation sure first of all. He studies his chief
under all conditions, discovers his little foibles and
vanities and feeds them sedulously. He masters
codes, rules and regulations, standing orders, prece-
dents and past correspondence, till it is dangerous
to contradict him and always safe to trust him. In
every difficulty he is at hand, clearing away per-
plexity and refreshing the ‘“ swithering’”’? mind with
his precision and assurance. He becomes indispen-
sable. The collector reposes absolute confidence
in him and is proud to say so in his reports.

Then the chitnis, if he is a Brahmin, addresses
himself to the task of eliminating the Purbhoo from
the service, or at least depriving him of place and
power. It is a delicate task, but the Brahmin’s

THE WAY OF THE BRAHMIN 149

touch is light. He never disparages a Purbhoo from
that day; ‘‘damning with faint praise” is safer
and as effectual. He practises the charity which
covereth a multitude of faults, but he leaves a tag
end of one peeping out to attract curiosity, and if
the collector asks questions, he is candid and tells
the truth, though with manifest reluctance. Then
he grapples with the gradation lists, which have
fallen into confusion, and puts them into such
excellent order that the collector can see at a glance
every man’s past services and present claims to
promotion. And from these lists it appears that
clearly, whenever any vacancy has to be filled, a
Brahmin has the first claim. And so, as the shades
of night yield to the dawn of day, the Purbhoo by
degrees fades away and disappears, and the star of
the Brahmin rises and shines everywhere with still
increasing splendour.

But the Purbhoo possesses his soul in patience,
and keeps a note of every slip that the Brahmin
makes. For the next chiitnis may be a Purbhoo,
and then the day of reckoning will come and old
scores will be paid off. The Brahmin knows that
too, and the thought of it makes him walk warily
even in the day of his prosperity. Thus our adminis-
tration is saved from utter corruption.

XV
THE COCONUT TREE

Amonc the classic fairy-tales which passed like
shooting stars across those dark hours of our boy-
hood in which we wrestled with the grim rudiments
of Latin and Greek, and which abide in the memory
after nearly all that they helped to brighten has
passed away, there was one which related to a con-
test between Neptune and Minerva as to which
should confer the greatest benefit on the human
race. Neptune first struck his trident on the ground
(or was it on the waves? ‘‘ Eheu fugaces’’—no,
that also is gone), and there sprang forth a noble
steed, pawing the ground, terrible in war and no
less useful in peace. Then the watery god leaned
back and smiled as if he would say, ‘‘ Now, beat
that.’’ But the Goddess of Wisdom brought out of
the earth a modest, dark tree bearing olives and, in
classic phrase, ‘‘ took the cake.’ Oriental mythology
is more luxuriant and fantastic than that of the
West, but I do not know if it has any legend parallel
to this. Ifit has, then I am sure the palm is awarded
to the deity who gave to the human race the tree

that bears the coconut.
150

THE USE OF THE COCONUT 151

Passing a confectioner’s shop, I saw a tempting
packet labelled ‘“‘Cokernut Toffee’’ I bought a
pennyworth and gave it to my little girl, and

“T laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge.”

How many boys and girls are there in this king-
dom to whom the word coconut connotes an
ingredient which goes to the making of a very tooth-
some sweetie? And how many confectioners and
shop girls are there whose idea isno broader? Again:

“I laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
And merrie sang the Birde as she sat upon the spraye.”’

And I said, “‘ Little Bird, what do you know of
the coconut ?’’ And it made answer, “It is a cup
full of food, rich and sweet, which kind hands hang
out for me in winter.’ How narrow may be the
keyhole through which we take our outlook on
things human and divine, never doubting that we
see the whole! In our own British Empire, only a
few thousand miles away, sits a mild Hindu, almost
unclad and wholly unlettered, to whom the tree
that bore the fruit that flavoured the toffee that my
little girl is enjoying seems to be one of the pre-
dominating tints of the whole landscape of life.
It puts a roof over his head, it lightens his dark-
ness, it helps to feed his body, it furnishes the wine
that maketh glad his heart and the oil that causeth
his face to shine, and time would fail me to tell of
all the other things that it does for him. As a type

23

152 THE COCONUT TREE

and symbol, it is always about him, spanning the
sunshine and shower of life with bows of hope.

The coconut tree is a palm, and has nothing to
do with cocoa of the breakfast table. That word
is a perversion of ‘‘ cacao,” and came to us from
Mexico: the other is the Portuguese word “coco,”
which means a nut. It is what Vasco da Gama
called the thing when he first saw it, and the word,
with our English translation added, has stuck to
it. The tree is, I need scarcely say, a palm, one of
many kinds that flourish in India. But none of
them can be ranked with it. The rough date palm
makes dense groves on sandy plains, but brings no
fruit to perfection, pining for something which only
Arabia can supply; the strong but unprofitable
‘“‘brab,” or fan palm, rises on rocky hills, the beauti-
ful fish-tailed palm in forests solitarily, while the
“areca”’ rears its tall, smooth stem and delicate
head in gardens and supplies millions with a solace
more indispensable than tobacco or tea. But the
coconut loves a sandy soil and the salt breath of the
sea and the company of its own kind. The others
grow erect as a mast, but the gentle coconuts lean
on the wind and mingle the waving of their sisterly
arms, casting a grateful shade on the humble folk
who live under their blessing.

To the mariner sailing by India’s coral strand
that country presents the aspect of an endless beach
of shell sand, quite innocent of coral, on which the
surf breaks continually into dazzling white foam

HARD TO NEGOTIATE 153

against a dark background of pensive palms. He
might naturally suppose that they had grown up of
themselves, like the screw-pines and aloes which
sometimes share the beach with them; but that
would be a great mistake. Everyone of them has
been planted and carefully watered for years and
manured annually with fresh foliage of forest trees
buried in a moat round the root. And so it grew in.
stature, but not in girth, until its head was sixty,
seventy or even eighty feet above the ground, and
a hundred nuts of various sizes hung in bunches from
long, shiny, green arms, each as thick as a man’s,
which had thrust themselves out from between the
lower fronds.

There is no production of Nature that I know of
less negotiable than a coconut as the tree presents
it. The man who first showed the way into it
deserved a place in mythology with Prometheus,
Jason and other heroes of the dawn. There is a
crab, I know, which lives on coconuts, enjoying the
scientific name of Birgus laivo, the Burglar; but
it seems to be a special invention, as big as a cat
and armed with two fearful pairs of pincers in front
for rending the outside casings of the fruits, and a
more delicate tool on its hindlegs for picking out
the meat. Other animals have to do without it,
as had man, I opine, in the stone and copper ages.
With the iron age came a.chopper, called in Western
India a “ koita,” with which he can hack his way
through most of the obstructions of life. When,

154 THE COCONUT TREE

with this, he has slashed off the tough outer rind
and the inch-thick packing of agglutinated fibres,
like metal wires, he has only to crack the hard shell
which contains the kernel.

How little we can conceive the spaces in his life
that would be empty without that firm pulp, at
once nutritious, sweet and fragrant! Curry cannot
be made without it, the cook cannot advance three
steps in its absence, pattimars laden with it are
sailing north, south, east and west, a thousand creaky
wooden mills are squeezing the limpid oil out of it,
a hundred thousand little earthen lamps filled with
that oil are making visible the smoky darkness of
hut and temple, brightening the wedding feast and
illuminating the sad page over which the candidate
for university honours nods his shaven head. That
oil fed lighthouses of the first order and illuminated
viceregal balls and durbars before paraffin and
kerosene inundated the earth. And it has other
uses. For arresting premature baldness and pre-
venting the hair turning grey its virtues are equalled
by no other oil known to us, and there is a fortune
awaiting the hairdresser who can find means effec-
tually to remove or suppress its peculiar and pene-
trating odour. Joao Gomez, my faithful ‘‘boy,’’ did
not object to the odour, and when he had been
tempted to pass my comb through his raven locks
as he was dusting my dressing table, I always knew
it.

When the white kernel has been turned to account,

VARIED USEFULNESS 155

the utilities of the coconut are not exhausted. The
shell, neatly bisected, makes a pair of teacups, and
either of these, fitted with a wooden handle, makes
a handy spoon. Laurenco de Gama demands one
or two of these inexpensive spoons to complete the
furnishing of my kitchen. As for the obstinate
casing that wraps the coconut shell, it is an article
of commerce. It must first be soaked for some
months in a pit on the slimy bank of the backwater,
until all the stuff that holds it together in a stiff
and obdurate mass has rotted away and set free
those hard and smooth fibres which nothing can
rot. These, when thoroughly purged of the foul
black pollution in which they have sweltered so long,
will go out to all quarters of the world under the
name of ‘coir’? to make indestructible door mats
and other indispensable things. It will penetrate
to every corner of India in which a white man
lives, to mat his verandahs and stuff his mattresses.

And who shall recount a tithe of its other uses ?
Of course, the nude man under the coconut tree
knows nothing of all this. He does without a
mattress, and has no use for a door mat. But he
cannot do without cordage, and if you took from
him his coconut fibre, life would almost stop.
Wherewith would he bind the rafters of his hut to
the beams, or tether the cow, or let down the bucket
into the well? What would all the boats do that
traverse the backwater, or lie at anchor in the bay,
or line the sandy beach? From the cable of the

156 THE COCONUT TREE

great pattimar, now getting under weigh for the
Persian Gulf with a cargo of coconuts, to the painter
of the dugout, ‘‘ hodee,”’ every yard of cordage about
them is made of imperishable coir.

When the axe is at last laid to the old coconut
tree, a beam will fall to the earth sixty feet in length,
hard as teak and already rounded and smoothed.
True, you cannot saw it into planks, but no one will
complain of that in a village which does not own
a saw. It cleaves readily enough and straightly,
forming long troughs most useful for leading water
from the well to the plantation and for many other
purposes. It can also be chopped into lengths
suitable for the ridge poles of the hut, or for bridges to
span the deep ditches which drain the rice fields
or feed the salt pans. When out in quest of snipe
I have sometimes had to choose between crossing
by one of those bridges, innocent of even a handrail,
and wading through the black slough of despond
which it spanned. Choosing neither, I went home,
but the “ Kolee” and the “‘ Agree’’ trip over them
like birds, balancing household chattels on their
steady heads.

We must not think, however, of the trunk as,
at the best, anything more than a by-product of
the coconut tree, whose head is more than its body.
Even while it lives its head is shorn once a year, for,
as fresh fronds push out and upward from the centre,
those of the outer circle get old and must be cut
away. And when one of those feathery, fern-like

USE OF THE LEAVES 157

fronds, toying with the breeze, comes crashing to
the ground, it is ten or twelve feet long, and consists
of a great backbone, as thick at the base as a man’s
leg, with a close-set row of swords on either side,
about a yard in length. They are hard and tough,
but supple yet and of a shiny green colour; but
they will turn to brown as they wither.

Now observe that this gigantic, unmanageable-
looking leaf, like everything else about the coconut
tree, is almost a ready-made article, demanding no
machinery to turn it to account, except the “ koita”’
which hangs ever ready from the nude man’s girdle.
With it he will cleave the backbone lengthwise,
and then, taking each half separately, he will simply
twist backwards every second sword and plait
them all into a mat two feet wide, eight or ten feet
long, and firmly bounded and held together on one
side by the unbreakable backbone. This is a
“jaolee,” lighter than slates, or tiles, and more
handy than any form of thatch. You have just to
arrange your “jaolees’’ neatly on your bamboo
frame, each overlapping the one below it, then tie
them securely in their places with coir rope and
your roof is made for a year.

There is yet another benevolence of the coconut
tree which I have left to the last, and the simple folk
of whom I am trying to write with fellow feeling
would certainly have named it first. I ought to
refer to it as a curse: they, without qualm or
question, call it a blessing. Let me try to describe

158 THE COCONUT TREE

it dispassionately. If you wander in any palm
grove in Western India, looking upward, it will soon
strike you that a large number of the trees do not
seem to bear coconuts at all, but black earthen pots.
If your visit should chance to be made early in the
morning, or late in the afternoon, the mystery will
soon be revealed. You will see a dusky, sinewy
figure, not of a monkey, but of a man, ascending
and descending those trees with marvellous celerity
and ease, grasping the trunks with his hands and
fitting his naked feet into slight notches cut in them.
The distance between the notches is so great that
his knee goes up to his chin at each step, but he
is as supple as he is sinewy and feels no inconvenience.
For he is a Bhundaree, or Toddy-drawer, and his
forefathers have been Bhundarees since the time,
I suppose, when Manu made his immortal laws.

His waistcloth is tightly girded about him, in
his hand he carries a broad billhook as bright and
keen as a razor, and from his caudal region depends
a tail more strange than any borne by beast or
reptile. It looks like a large brown pot, constructed
in the middle. It is, in fact, a large gourd, or cala-
bash, hanging by a hook from the climber’s waist-
band. When he has reached the top of a tree, he
gets among the branches and, sitting astride of
one of them, proceeds to detach one of the black
pots from the stout fruit stem on which it is fastened,
and empty its contents into his tail. Then, taking
his billhook, he carefully pares the raw end of the

TODDY 159

stem, refastens the black pot in its place and hurries
down to make the ascent of another tree, and so
on until his tail is full of a foaming white liquor
spotted with drowned honey bees and filling the
surrounding air with a rank odour of fermentation.
This liquor is “‘ toddy.’’

If I were a Darwin I would not leave that word
until I had traced the agencies which wafted it
over sea and land from the shores of Hindustan to
the Scottish coast, where it first took root and,
quickly adapting itself to a strange environment,
developed into a new and vigorous species, spread
like the thistle and became a national institution.
At first it was only the Briton’s way of mouthing
a common native word, ‘“‘ tadi’’ (pronounced ta-dee),
which meant palm juice; but it became current in
its present shape as early as 1673, when the traveller
Fryer wrote of ‘‘the natives singing and roaring
all night long, being drunk with toddy, the wine
of the cocoe.’ About a century later Burns sang,

The lads and lasses, blythely bent,
To mind baith saul and body,

Sit round the table, weel content,
And steer about the toddy.

Between these I can find no vestigia, but imagina-
tion easily fills the gap. I see a company of jovial
Scots, met in Calcutta, or Surat, on St. Andrew’s
Day. European wines and beer are expensive,
whisky not obtainable at all; but the skilful
khansamah makes up a punch with toddy spirit,

24

160 THE COCONUT TREE

hot water, sugar and limes, and they are “ well
content.’ After many years I see the few of them
who still survive foregathered again in the old
country, and one proposes to have a good brew of
toddy for auld lang syne. If real toddy spirit
cannot be had, what of that ? Whisky is found to
take very kindly to hot water and sugar and limes,
and the old folks at home and the neighbours and
the minister himself pronounce a most favourable
verdict on “‘ toddy.’”’ In short, it has come to stay.

But we must return to the liquor in the Bhun-
daree’s gourd. It is the rich sap which should
have gone to the forming of coconuts, which is
intercepted by cutting off the point of the fruit
stalk and tying on an earthen pot. If the pot is
clean, the juice, when it is taken down in the morn-
ing, not fermented yet but just beginning to sparkle
with minute bubbles, not too sweet and not so oily
as the milk of the coconut, is nectar to a hot and
thirsty soul. No summer drink have I drunk so
innocently restorative after a hot and toilsome
march on a broiling May morning. But the Bhun-
daree will not squander it so: he takes care not to
clean his pots, and when he takes them down in
the morning the liquor is already foaming like
London stout. Not that he means to drink it
himself, for you must know that, by the rules of
his caste, he is a total abstainer, being a Bhundaree,
whose function is to draw toddy, not to drink it.
This is one of those profound institutes by which

TODDY VENDORS 161

the wisdom of the ancients fenced the whole social
system of this strange land.

But, while the Bhundaree must refuse all intoxi-
cating drinks himself, it is his duty to exercise a
large tolerance towards those who are not so hin-
dered. He is, in fact, a partner in the business of
Babajee, Licensed Vendor of Fresh Toddy, towards
whose spacious, open-fronted shop, thatched with
“‘jaolees,”’ he now carries his gourds. There the
contents will stand, in dirty vessels and a warm
place, maturing their exhilarating qualities until the
evening, when the Tam o’ Shanters and Souter
Johnnies of the village begin to assemble and squat
in a ring in the open space in front. They may be
Kolees, or fishermen, and Agrees, who make salt,
and aboriginal Katkurrees from the jungle, with their
bows and arrows, most bibulous of all, but among
them all there will be no Bhundaree. Babajee sits
apart, presiding and serving, beside a dirty table,
on which are many bottles and dirty tumblers of
patterns which were on our tables thirty years ago.
The assembly begins solemnly, discussing social pro-
blems and bartering village gossip, for the Hindu
is by nature staid. After a while, at the second
bottle perhaps, cheerfulness will supervene, then
mirth and garrulity, ending, as the night closes
round, with wordy contention and a general brawl.
But nothing serious will happen, for toddy, though
decidedly heady, is at the worst a thin potation.
A strong and very pure spirit is distilled from it,

162 THE COCONUT TREE

which has its devotees, but the rustic, as a rule,
prefers quantity to quality. We are often told that
the British Government taught the people of India
to drink, but the scene that I have tried to describe
is indigenous conviviality, much older than any
European connection with the country.

Is it any wonder that the coconut has become an
emblem of fertility and prosperity and all good luck?
When a new house is building you will see a high
pole over the doorway, bearing coconuts at the top,
with an umbrella spread over them. Do not ask
the owner the meaning of the sign, for he does not
know. He does not think about such matters, but
he feels about them and he knows that that is the
right thing to do. Besides, he might ask you why
you nail a horseshoe over your door. The difference
between us and him is that we do such things in
jest, no longer believing in them. They are the
husks of a dead faith with us. But the Hindu’s
faith is very living still. So, when he breaks a
coconut at the launching of a pattimar, he is a
gainer in hope, if nothing else; while we squander
our champagne and gain nothing. That nut follows
him even to the grave, or burning ground, with
mystic significances which I cannot explain. I have
been told that, when a very holy man dies, who
always clothed himself in ashes and never profaned
his hands with work, his disciples sometimes break
a coconut over his head. If the spirit can escape
from the body through the sutures of the skull

AWAY TO HEAVEN 163

instead of by any of the other orifices, it is believed
to find a more direct route to heaven, so the purpose
of this ceremony may be to facilitate its exit that
way. In that case the breaking of the nut is perhaps

only an accident, due to its not being so hard as the
holy man’s skull.

XVI
THE BETEL NUT

OnE half the world does not know how the other
half lives. Noticing a pot of areca nut tooth-
paste on a chemist’s counter, I asked him what
the peculiar properties of the areca nut were—in
short, what was it good for. He replied that it was
an astringent and acted beneficially on the gums,
but he had never heard that it was used for any other
purpose than the manufacture of an elegant denti-
frice. I felt inclined to question him about the
camel in order to see whether he would tell me that
it was a tropical animal, chiefly noted for the fine
quality of its hair, from which artist’s brushes were
made. Here was a man whose special business it is
to know the properties and uses of all drugs and
their action on the human system, and he had not
the faintest notion that there are nearly 300
millions of His Majesty’s subjects, and many
millions more beyond his empire, who could scarcely
think of life as a thing to be desired if they were
obliged to go through it without the areca nut.
For the areca nut is the betel nut.

In the Canarese language and the kindred dialects

164

THE BETEL VINE 165

of Malabar it is called by a name which is rendered
as adtke, or adtka, in scientific books, but would stand
more chance of being correctly pronounced by the
average Englishman if it were spelled uddiky. The
coast districts of Canara and Malabar being famed
for their betel nuts, the trade name of the article
was taken from the languages current there, and was
tortured by the Portuguese into areca. Over the
greater part of India the natives use the Hindus-
tanee name supari, but by Englishmen it is best
known as the betel nut, because it is always found
in company with the betel leaf, with which, however,
it has no more connection than strawberries have
with cream. The one is the leaf of a kind of pepper
vine, and the other is the seed, or nut, of a palm.
But nature and man have combined to marry them
to one another, and it is difficult to think of them
separately.

In life the betel vine climbs up the stem of the
areca palm, and in death the areca nut is rolled in
a shroud of the betel leaf and the two are munched
together. Other things are often added to the
morsel, such as a clove, a cardamom, or a pinch of
tobacco, and a small quantity of fresh lime is indis-
pensable.

What is the precise nature of the consolation
derived from the chewing of this mixture it is not
easy to say. Outwardly it produces effects which
are visible enough, to wit, a most copious flow of
‘saliva, which is dyed deep red by the juice of the

166 THE BETEL NUT

nut, so that a betel nut chewer seems to go about
spitting blood all the day. As every Hindu is a
betel nut chewer, those 943,903 superficial miles
of country which make up our Indian Empire must
be bespattered to a degree which it dizzies the mind
to contemplate. This is one of the difficulties of
Indian administration. In large towns and centres
of business it is found necessary to fortify the public
buildings in various ways. The Custom House in
Bombay has the wall painted with dark red ochre
to a height of three or four feet from the ground.

But these are the outward results. What is the
inwardness of the thing? In a word, why do the
people chew betel nut? Surely not that they may
spit on our public buildings. That is a chance result,
not sought for and not shunned. There is, of course,
some deeper reason. Early travellers in India were
much exercised about this and used to question
the people, from whom they got some curious
explanations. One reports, ‘“‘ They say they do it
to comfort the heart, nor could live without it.”
Another says, ‘‘It bites in the mouth, accords rheume,
cooles the head, strengthens the teeth and is all
their phisicke.’’ A Latin writer gets quite eloquent.
“Ex ea mansione’’—by that chewing—he says,
“‘mire recreantur, et ad labores tolerandos et ad
languores discutiendos.’’

But the remarkable thing is that the betel nut
has these effects only on the Hindu constitution.
To a European the strong, astringent taste and

INDISPENSABLE 167

penetrating odour of the betel nut are alike insuffer-
able, and there is no instance on record, as far as I
know, of an Englishman becoming a betel nut chewer.
But wherever Hindu blood circulates, not in India
only, but all through the islands of the Malay Archi-
pelago, as far as the Philippines, the betel nut
is an indispensable ingredient of any life that is
worth living. Mohammedanism forbids spirits and
Brahminism condemns all things that intoxicate
or stupefy, but the betel nut is like the cup that
cheers yet not inebriates. No religion speaks dis-
respectfully of it. It flourishes, blessed by all, and
takes its place among the institutions of civilisation.

Indeed it is the chief cement of social intercourse
in a country where all ordinary conviviality between
man and man is almost strangled by the quarantine
enforced against ceremonial defilement. Friend
offers friend the betel nut box just as Scotsmen
offered the snuff-box in the hearty old days that are
passing away. And all visits of ceremony, durbars,
receptions, leave-takings, and public functions of the
like kind are brought to an august close by the
distribution of pan supari. To go through this rite
without visible repugnance is part of the training
of our young Civil Servants. When the interview or
ceremony has lasted as long as it was intended to
last, there enter, with due pomp, bearers of heavy-
scented garlands, woven of jasmine and marigold,
and in form like the muffs and boas that ladies wear
in winter. These are put upon the necks and

25

168 THE BETEL NUT

wrists of the guests in order of rank. Silver vases
and sprinklers follow, containing rose-water and
attar of roses. You may ward off the former from
your person by offering your handkerchief for it,
and you may present the back of your hand for the
latter, of which one drop will be applied to your
skin with a tiny silver or golden spoon.

Finally, when everybody is reeking with incon-
gruous odours and trying not to be sick, a silver
tray appears with the daintiest little packets of pan
supart, each pinned with a clove, and every guest is
expected to transfer one to his mouth, for they have
been prepared by a Brahmin and cannot hurt the
most delicate caste. To an Englishman, however,
it is now generally conceded to compromise by
keeping the morsel in his hand, as if waiting an
opportunity to enjoy it more at his leisure. When
you get home your servant craves it of you and
contrasts real rajah’s pan supari with the stuff
which the poor man gets in the bazaar.

The chewing of betel nut requires more apparatus
and makes greater demands on a man’s time and
personal care than the smoking of tobacco or any
of the allied vices. To cut the nut neatly an instru-
ment is used like an enormous pair of nutcrackers
with a sharp cutting edge. The lime should be
made from oyster shells and it must be freshly
burned and slaked. Exposure to the air soon
spoils it, so a small, air-tight tin box is required to
keep it in. Lastly, the betel leaf must be fresh,

THE BETEL INDUSTRY 169

and in a hot climate green leaves do not keep
their freshness without special care.

But the necessity for attending to all these matters
no doubt adds greatly to the interest which a chewer
of pan supari is able to find in life. Moreover, his
taste and wealth have scope for expression in the
elegance of his appointments, and by these you may
generally judge of a man’s rank and means. A
well-to-do Mahratta cartman will carry in his
waistband a sort of bijou hold-all of coloured cloth,
which, when unrolled, displays neat pockets of
different forms for the leaves, broken nuts, lime
box, spices, etc. ; but a native magistrate, who goes
about attended by a peon and need not carry his
own things, will have a box of polished brass, or
even silver, divided into compartments.

One may easily infer that to meet such a universal
want there must be a correspondingly great industry,
and the cultivation of the betel nut is indeed a great
industry, and a most beautiful one. Surely since
Adam first began to till the ground in the sweat of
his face, his children have found no tillage so Eden-
like as this. India has produced no Virgil to take
the common charms of a farmer’s life and put them
into immortal song, so we search her literature in
vain to learn how her simple, rustic people feel
about these things, and in what we see of their life
there is little sign that they feel about them at
all; but when the Englishman, wandering, gun in
hand, up a steaming valley among forest-clad hills,

170 THE BETEL NUT

suddenly finds the path lead him into a betel nut
garden, with no wire fence, or locked gate, or in-
hospitable notice threatening prosecution to tres-
passers, he feels as if he had entered some region of
bliss where the earthly senses are too narrow for the
delights that press for entrance to the soul.

In the first place, the areca nut palm is almost,
if not altogether, the most graceful of all its graceful
tribe. Unlike the coconut, it grows as erect as a
flagstaff, and the effect of this is increased by its
extreme slenderness, for though it may attain a
height of fifty feet, its diameter scarcely exceeds
six inches. At the top of the stem there is a sheath
of polished green, from the top of which again
there issues a tuft of the most ethereal, feathery
fronds, diverging and drooping with matchless grace.
Under these hang the clusters of reddish-brown nuts,

As the areca nut will not grow except in places
that are at once moist and warm, the gardens are
generally situated in narrow valleys and dells among
hills, with little streams of limpid water rippling
past them or through them. The steaming heat
of such situations can only be realised by one who
has traversed them at noon in the month of May
in pursuit of sport or natural history. But the
palms grow so close together that their fronds mingle
into an almost unbroken roof, through which the
sun can scarcely peep, and every air that enters
there has the heat charmed out of it, and as it
wanders among the broad, aromatic leaves of the

CULTIVATORS AND HARVEST 171

betel vines which wreathe the pillars of that fairy
hall, it is softened with balmy moisture, and laden
with fragrance and scent to woo your senses in
perfect tune with the tinkling music of the water
and the enchanting beauty of the whole scene.

In a large hut among these shades, with bananas
waving their banner leaves over the smooth and
well-swept yard in front, where the children play,
lives the family that cultivates the garden. They
are a sect of Brahmins, but very unbrahminical,
unsophisticated, industrious, temperate, kind and
hospitable. Other Brahmins despise them and wish
to deny them the name, because they have soiled
their priestly hands with agriculture. But they
return the contempt, and walk in the way of their
fathers, a way which leads them among the purest
pleasures that this life affords and keeps them from
many of its more sordid temptations. Perhaps the
picture has its darker shades too. I have not seen
them, and why should I look for them ?

The betel nut harvest is something of the nature
of an acrobatic performance, for the crop is not on
the ground, but on poles forty or fifty feet high.
This is the manner in which it is gathered. The
farmer, attended by his wife, goes out, and slipping
a loose loop of rope over his feet to keep them together,
so that when he gets the trunk of a tree between
them it may fit like a wedge, he clasps one of the
trees with his hands and goes up at a surprising rate.
He carries with him a long rope, and when he reaches

172 THE BETEL NUT

the top, he fastens one end of it to the tree, and
throws the other to his wife, who goes to a distance
and draws it tight. Then the man breaks off a
heavy bunch of ripe nuts, and hitching it on the
rope lets it go. It shoots down with such velocity
that it would knock his wife down did she not know
how to dodge it skilfully and break its force in a
bend of the rope.

When all the bunches are on the ground, the man
begins to sway his body violently till the tender
and supple palm is swinging like a pendulum and
almost striking the trees on either side. Watching
his opportunity, the man grasps one of these and
transfers himself to it with the nimbleness of a
monkey. In this way he makes an aerial journey
round the garden and avoids the fatigue of climb-
ing up and down every separate tree.

The gathered betel nuts soon find their way to
the warehouses of fat Bunias at the coast ports,
where they are peeled and prepared and sorted and
piled in great heaps according to quality, and finally
shipped in pattimars and cotias and coasting steamers,
and so disseminated over the length and breadth of
the land to be the comforters of poor and rich.

It only remains to say that the betel nut is not
used in the East for tooth-powder, though the
natives believe that the practice of chewing it saves
them from toothache. When they use any denti-
frice it is generally charcoal, and their toothbrush
is either the forefinger or a fibrous stick chewed at

TEETH CLEANING 173

the end till it becomes like a stiff paintbrush.
But whatever he may use for the purpose, the Hindu
cleans his teeth every morning, and that most
thoroughly, before he will allow food to pass his
lips, and the whiteness and soundness of his teeth
are an object of envy to Englishmen.

XVII
A HINDU FESTIVAL

PoETS may sing,
“Let the ape and tiger die,”’

but they are not quite dead yet, only caged, and
where is the man in whose bosom there lurks no
wish that he could open the door just once in a way
and let them have a frisk? In the East there is
no hypocrisy about the matter. The tiger’s den
is barred and locked, and the British Government
keeps the key, but the ape has an appointed day
in the year on which he shall have his outing. They
call it the Holi, which is a misnomer, for of all
Hindu festivals this is the most unholy; but of
that anon.

I asked a Brahmin what this festival comme-
morated, and he said he did not know. He knew
how to observe it, which was the main thing. Of
course, there is an explanation of it in Hindu
mythology, which the Brahmin ought to have
known, and very probably did know, but was
ashamed to tell. But it matters little, for we may

be well assured that the explanation was invented
174

THE TIME OF HOLI 175

to sanctify the festival long after the festival itself
came into vogue, as has been the case with some of
our most Christian holidays.

The Holi comes round about the time of the vernal
equinox, when victory declares for day and warmth
in its long struggle with night and cold. Then
Nature rises and shakes herself as Samson rose and
shook himself and snapped the seven new cords
that bound him, as tow is snapped when it smells
the fire. Then ‘‘the wanton lapwing gets himself
another crest,” and then also the young Hindu’s
fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love; and so
it came about quite naturally that, looking around,
among his plentiful gods, for a deity who might
fitly be invited to preside over his lusty rejoicings
at this season, he pitched upon Krishna.

For Krishna, when he was upon this earth, was
an amorous youth, and his goings on with certain
milkmaids were such as would shock Mrs. Grundy
at the present day even in India, supposing he had
been only a man. But he was a god, therefore his
doing a thing made it right, and, where he presides,
his worshippers may do as he did. Consequently,
man, woman and child of every caste and grade
give themselves licence, during these days of the
Holi, to act and speak in a manner that would be
scandalous at any other time of the year.

Hindus of the better sort are beginning to be
outwardly, and some of them, I hope, inwardly,

rather ashamed of this festival, and it is time they
26

' 176 A HINDU FESTIVAL

were. Yet there is always something cheering in the
sight of untutored mirth and exuberant animal joy
breaking out and triumphing over the sadness of
life and the monotony of lowly toil; and I confess
that I find a pleasing side to this festival of the Holi.
I like it best as I have seen it in a fishing village on
the west coast of India.

At first sight you would not suspect the black
and brawny Koli of much gaiety, but there is deep
down in him a spring of mirth and humour which,
‘“‘when wine and free companions kindle him,” can
break out into the most boisterous hilarity and
jocundity and even buffoonery, throwing aside all
trammels of convention and decorum. His women
folk, too, though they do not go out of their proper
place in the social system, assert themselves vigor-
ously within it, and are gay and vivacious and well
aware of their personal attractions. So the Koli
village looks forward to the Holi and makes timely
preparation for it.

The night before the poornima, or full moon, of
the month Phalgoon arrives, each trim fishing
boat is stored with flowers and leafy branches, all
the flags that can be mustered and a drum; then
the whole village goes a-fishing. Next morning
each housewife gets up early to decorate her house
and trick out herself and her children. For though
the Koli is the most naked of men, his whole work-
a-day costume consisting of one rag about equal in
amplitude to half a good pocket-handkerchief, his wife

KOLI WOMEN 177

is the most dressy of women. She is always well-
dressed even on common days. The bareness of
her limbs may perhaps shock our notions of pro-
priety at first, for, being a mud-wader of necessity,
like the stork and the heron, she girds her garments
about her very tightly indeed; but this only sets
off her wonderfully erect and athletic figure, while
her well-set head looks all the nicer that it has no
covering except her own neatly-bound hair. ‘She
never draws her saree coyly over her head, like other
native women, when she meets a man. On this
day there is no change in the fashion of her costume
(that never changes), but she puts on her brightest
dress, blue, or red, or lemon yellow, with all her
private jewellery, and decks her hair with a small
chaplet of bright flowers.

Her children are tricked out with more fancy.
The little brown girl, who yesterday had not one
square inch of cloth on the whole of her tiny person,
comes out a petite miss in a crimson bodice and a
white skirt, with her shining black hair oiled and
combed and plaited and decked with flowers, and
her neck and arms and feet twinkling with orna-
ments. Her brother of six or seven looks as if he
were going to a fancy-dress ball in the character of
His Highness the Holkar. His small head is set in
a great three-cornered Maratha turban, and his
body, a stranger to the feel of clothes, is masked
in a resplendent purple jacket. The young men of
the village, such of them as are not gone a-fishing,

178 A HINDU FESTIVAL

have donned clean white jackets. Beyond that
they will not go, contemning effeminacy.

About nine o’clock, when the sun is now well up,
the distant sound of a tom-tom is heard, and the
first of the returning fleet of muchwas appears at
the mouth of the creek. A long line of red and
white flags extends from the top of the mainyard
to the helm and streamers flutter from the mast-
heads. A monster bouquet of marigolds is mounted
on the bowsprit, branches of trees are stuck about
in all possible situations, and three or four large
fishes hang from the bow, trailing their tails in the
water. With the exception of the man at the helm,
who sits stolid, minding his business, and one youth
who plays the tom-tom, the crew are standing in a
ring, gesticulating with their arms and legs, or
waving wands and branches of trees. Some have
half of their faces smeared with red paint. If a
boat passes they greet it with a shout and a sally
of wit or ribaldry. The other muchwas follow close
behind, with every inch of white sail spread and all
a-flutter with flags and streamers: it would be diffi-
cult to imagine a prettier spectacle, and the tom-
toming and the happiness beaming on the faces of
the crews are almost infectious. One feels almost
compelled to wave one’s hat and cry, ‘‘Ilip, hip,
hooray ! ”’

The boats come to shore, and then there ought
to be a tumbling out of the silvery harvest and a
gathering of women and a strife indescribable of

ON THE WATER 179

shrill tongues, and then a long procession of wives
and daughters trotting to market, each balancing a
great, dripping basket on her comely head, while
the husbands and fathers go home to eat and sleep.
But there is none of that to-day. The silvery harvest
may go to destruction and the husbands and fathers
can do without sleep for once. The children are
taken on board in all their finery, and friends
join and musicians with their instruments. Then
all sails are spread again and the boats start for
a circuit round the harbour. The wind blows fiercely
from the north, and each buoyant muchwa scuds
along at a fearful pace, heeling over until the
rippling water fingers the edge of the gunwale as
if it were just getting ready to leap over and take
possession. But the hilarious Koli balances himself
on the sloping thwarts and jumps and sings and
claps his hands, while the pipes screech and the
drums rattle. Twice, or three times, does the whole
fleet go out over the bar and wheel and return,
each boat racing to be first, with no more sense of
danger than a porpoise at play.

At last they have had enough. The sails are
furled and the boats beached, the big fishes are
taken down from the bows, and the whole crowd,
with their trophies and garlands, dance their way to
the village. There it is better that we leave them.
To-night great fires will be lighted in the middle of
the main road and capacious pots of toddy will be
at hand, and every merry Koli will get hilariously

180 A HINDU FESTIVAL

drunk and do and say things which we had better
not see and hear. And the children will look on and
‘try to imitate their elders. And women will find
it best to keep out of the way for the sake of their
pretty dresses, if there were no better reason.
For pots of water dyed crimson with goolal powder
are ready, and everybody has licence to splash
everybody when he gets a chance. Any time
during the next two or three days you may find your
own servants coming home dappled with red.

So the ape has his fling. And the tiger is lurking
not far behind. In each of those fires it is the
proper thing to roast a cock, throwing him in alive.
If the fire is a great one, a general village fire, then
it is still greater fun to throw in a live goat. But
the worst of these ceremonies are happily going out
of fashion. For the English law is stern, and the
sahibs have strange and quixotic notions about
cruelty to animals, and although they are far away
on tour at this season and no native officer would
voluntarily interfere with an immemorial custom,
still the tiger walks in fear in these days and the
Koli is often content to roast a coconut as proxy for
a cock or a goat.

XVIII
INDIAN POVERTY
THE STANDARD OF LIVING

WHEN Mr. Keir Hardie was in India he satisfied
himself that the standard of living among the
working classes in India has been deteriorating. This
is interesting psychologically, and one would like to
know by what means Mr. Keir Hardie attained to
satisfaction on such a great and important question.
Doubtless he had the ungrudging assistance of Mr.
Chowdry.

The poverty of India has for a good many years
been a handy weapon, like the sailor's belaying pin,
for everyone who wanted to “have at” our ad-
ministration of that country; and if “a lie which
is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,’”’ then this
one must be as black as Tartarus, for it is indubitably
more than half a truth. The common field-labourer
in India is about as poor as man can be. He is
very nearly as poor as a sparrow. His hut, built
by himself, is scarcely more substantial or per-
manent than the sparrow’s nest, and his clothing

compares very unfavourably with the sparrow’s
181

182 INDIAN POVERTY

feathers. The residue of his worldly goods consists
of a few cooking pots and, it must be admitted, a
few ornaments on his wife.

But a sparrow is usually well fed and quite happy.
It has no property simply because it wants none.
If it stored honey like the busy bee, or nuts like
the thrifty squirrel, it would be a prey to constant
anxiety and stand in hourly danger of being plun-
dered of its possessions, and perhaps killed for the
sake of them. Therefore to speak of a Hindu’s
poverty as if it certainly implied want and un-
happiness is mere misrepresentation born of ignor-
ance. In all ages there have been men so enamoured
of the possessionless life that they have abandoned
their worldly goods and formed brotherhoods pledged
to lifelong poverty. The majority of religious
beggars in India belong to brotherhoods of this kind,
and are the sturdiest and best-fed men to be seen
in the country, especially in time of famine.

But the Hindu peasant is not a begging friar, and
‘may be supposed to have some share of the love
of money which is common to humanity; so it is
worth while to inquire why he is normally so very
poor. There are two reasons, both of which are
so obvious and have so often been pointed out by
those who have known him best, that there is little
excuse for overlooking them. The first of them is
thus stated in Tennant’s Indian Recreations, written
in 1797, before British rule had affected the people
of India much in one direction or another. “ In-

THE CAUSE OF POVERTY 183

dustry can hardly be ranked among their virtues.
Among all classes it is necessity of subsistence and
not choice that urges to labour; a native will not
earn six rupees a month by working a few hours
more, if he can live upon three ; and if he has three
he will not work at all”’ Such was the Hindu a
century ago in the eyes of an observant and judicious
man, studying him with all the sympathetic interest
of novelty, and such he is now.

The other reason for the chronic poverty of the
Indian peasant is that, if he had money beyond his
immediate necessity, he could not keep it. It is
the despair of the Government of India and of every
English official who endeavours to improve his
condition that he cannot keep his land, or his
cattle, or anything else on which his permanent
welfare depends. The following extract from The
Reminiscences of an Indian Police Official gives a
lively picture of the effect of unaccustomed wealth,
not on peasants, but on farmers owning land and
cattle and used to something like comfort.

‘“Yellapa, like all cotton growers in that part of
the Western Presidency, profited enormously by the
high price of the staple during the American war.
Silver was poured into the country (literally) in
crores (millions sterling), and cultivators who pre-
viously had as much as they could do to live,
suddenly found themselves possessed of sums their
imagination had never dreamt of. What to do
with their wealth, how to spend their cash was their

2)

184 INDIAN POVERTY

problem. Having laden their women and children
with ornaments, and decked them out in expensive
sarees, they launched into the wildest extravagance
in the matter of carts and trotting bullocks, going
even as far as silver-plated yokes and harness
studded with silver mountings. Even silver tyres
to the wheels became the fashion. Twelve and
fifteen rupees were eagerly paid for a pair of trotting
bullocks. Trotting matches for large stakes were
common ; and the whole rural population appeared
with expensive red silk umbrellas, which an enter-
prising English firm imported as likely to gratify the
general taste for display. Many took to drink, not
country liquors such as had satisfied them pre-
viously, but British brandy, rum, gin, and even
champagne.”

A few pages further on the author tells us of the
ruin by debt and drunkenness of the families which
had indulged in these extravagances. The fact is
that to keep for to-morrow what is in the hand to-day
demands imagination, purpose and self-discipline,
which the Hindu working man has not. He is the
product of centuries, during which his rulers made
the life of to-morrow too uncertain, while his climate
made the life of to-day too easy. No outward
applications will alone cure his poverty, because it
is a symptom of an inward disease.

When a healthier state of mind shall awaken an
appetite for comforts and conveniences, and create
necessities unknown to his fathers, then degrading

MR. KEIR HARDIE’S CHARGE 185

poverty will no longer be possible as the common
lot. And it was to be hoped that the British rule
would in time have this happy effect. Tennant
evidently thought that it had begun to do so even
in his day. ‘‘ The existence,” he says, “of a regular
British Government is but a recent circumstance ;
yet in the course of a few years complete security
has been afforded to all of its dependants; many
new manufactures have been established, many
more have been extended to answer the demands
of a larger exportation. We have therefore conferred
upon our Asiatic subjects an increase of security, of
industry and of produce, and of consequent greater
means of enjoyment.”

It is therefore a very grave charge that Mr. Keir
Hardie brings against the British Administration
when he says, a century after these words were
written, that the standard of living among the Hindu
peasantry has deteriorated. Happily there does
not appear to have been a close relation between
facts and Mr. Keir Hardie’s conclusions during his
Indian tour, so we may continue to put our con-
fidence in the many hopeful indications that exist
of a distinct improvement in the ideal of life which
has so long prevailed among our poor Indian fellow-
subjects. The rise in the wages of both skilled
and unskilled labour during even the last thirty
years, especially in and near important towns, has
been most remarkable.

It is more to the point to know what the labourer

186 INDIAN POVERTY

is able to do and actually does with his wages,
and here the returns of trade and the reports of
the railway companies, post office and savings
bank have striking evidence to offer. They are
published annually, and anyone, even Mr. Keir
Hardie, may consult them who likes his facts in
statistical form. For those who live in India there
are abundant evidences with more colour in them.
Some thirty years ago, or more, there was a steam-
ship company in Bombay owning two small steamers
which carried passengers across the harbour. By
degrees it extended its operations and increased its
fleet until it had a daily service of fast steamers,
with accommodation for nearly a thousand third-
class passengers, which went down the coast as
far as Goa, calling at every petty port on the way.
The head of the firm retired some years ago, having
made his pile. Seldom has a more profitable enter-
prise been started in Bombay. And whence did the
profits come? From the pockets of Hindu peasants.
The Mahrattas of the Ratnagiri District supply most
of the “‘ labour’’ required in Bombay, and for these
the company spread its nets. And by their incessant
coming and going it amassed its wealth.

Heads of mercantile firms and Government offices,
and all who have to deal with the Mahratta “‘ putti-
wala,’’ viewed its success without surprise. Though
always grumbling at his wages, he never appears to
be without the means and the will to travel. A
marriage, a religious ceremony in his family, or the

GROWTH OF LUXURY 187

death of some relative, requires his immediate
presence in his village, and he asks for leave. If he
cannot get it otherwise, he offers to forfeit his pay
for the period. If it is still refused, he resigns his
situation and goes. This does not indicate pinching
poverty ; there must be some margin between such
men and starvation. And a saunter through their
villages will amply confirm such a surmise.

It is no uncommon thing in these coast villages
to see that foreign luxury, a chair, perhaps even
an easy-chair, in the verandah of a common Bhun-
daree (toddy-drawer). The rapidly growing use of
chairs, glass tumblers, enamelled ironware, soda-
water and lemonade, patent medicines, and even
cheap watches, declares plainly that the young
Hindu of the present day does not live as his fathers
did. Men go better dressed, and their children are
clothed at an earlier age. The advertisements in
vernacular languages that one meets with, circulated
and posted up in all sorts of places, tell the same
tale convincingly ; for the advertiser knows his
business, and will not angle where no fish rise.

Nor are large towns like Bombay the only places
where the Hindu peasant widens his horizon and
acquires new tastes. In the Fiji Islands there are
about 22,000 natives of India who went out as
indentured coolies with the option of returning at
the end of five years at their own expense, or after
ten years at that of Government. When these men
come home, they bring with them new tastes and

188 INDIAN POVERTY

new ideas, as well as the habit of saving money and
thousands of rupees saved during their short exile.
In Mauritius and South Africa the Hindu working
man is learning the same lessons. When he gets
back to the sleepy life of his native village, he is not
likely to settle down contentedly at the level from
which he started.

On every hand, in short, forces are at work stirring
discontent in the breasts of the younger generation
with the existence which was the heritage of their
fathers. These forces operate from the outside, and
the mass is large and very inert: it would be rash
to say that in the heart of it there are not still
millions who regard a monotonous struggle for a
bare existence as their portion from Providence.
But when a man who has travelled in India for half
a cold season tells us that the standard of living in
India has deteriorated, we are tempted to quote
from Sir Ali Baba: ‘‘ What is it that these travel-
ling people put on paper? Let me put it in the
form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the
travelling M.P. treasures up and the Anglo-Indian
hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous hazy, dis-
torted impressions.” ‘‘One of the most serious
duties attending a residence in India is the correcting
of those misapprehensions which your travelling
M.P. sacrifices his bath to hustle upon paper.”

XIX
BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

OF the results of the Roman supremacy in Britain
none have been so permanent as their influence on
our language. No doubt this was less due to any
direct effect that their residence among the Britons
had at the time on vernacular speech than to the
fact that, for many centuries after their departure,
Latin was the language, throughout Europe, of
literature and scholarship. Our supremacy in India
is acting on the languages of that country in both
ways, and though it has scarcely lasted half as long
yet as the Roman rule in Britain, English already
bids fair to become one day the common tongue of
the Hindus. But there is also a current flowing
the other way, comparatively insignificant, but
curious and interesting.

Few persons in England are aware how often they
use words of Indian origin in common speech. In
attempting to give a list of these I will exclude the
trade names of articles of Indian produce or manu-
facture, which have no literary interest, and also
words which indicate objects, ideas or customs
that are not English, and therefore have no English

189

190 BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

equivalents, such as ‘“‘tom-tom,” ‘‘sepoy”’ and
“suttee.’ I will also omit Indian words, such
as “‘ bundobust,” and “ griffin,’’ which are used by
writers like Thackeray in the same way in which
French terms are commonly introduced into English
composition.

Of course, it is not always possible to draw a hard
and fast line. There are words which first came
into England as the trade names of Indian products,
but have extended their significance, or entirely
changed it, and taken a permanent place in the
English language. Pepper still means what it
originally meant, but it has also become a verb.
Another example is Shawl, a word which has lost all
trace of its Oriental origin. It is a pure Hindustani
word, pronounced “ Shal,’”’ and indicating an article
thus described in the seventeenth century by Theve-
not, as quoted in Hobson-Jobson :—‘‘ Une Chal, qui
est une maniére de toilette d’une laine trés fine qui
se fait a Cachmir.’ With the article to England
came the name, but soon spread itself over all fabrics
worn in the same fashion, except the Scotch plaid,
which held its own.

Somewhat similar is Calico, originally a fine
cotton cloth imported from Calicut. This place is
called Calicot by the natives, and may have dropped
the final T through the influence of French dress-
makers. Chintz is another example, being the
Hindustani word “ cheent,’’ which means a spotted
cotton cloth. In trade fabrics are always described

PYJAMAS AND SHAMPOO IQI

in the plural, and the Z in Chintz is no doubt a
perversion, through misunderstanding, of the ter-
minal S. Lac is another Indian word which has
retained its own meaning, but it has gone beyond
it and given rise to a verb “to lacquer.”

With these perhaps should be mentioned Pyjamas
and Shampoo, both of which have undergone strange
perversions. Pyjama is an Indian name for loose
drawers or trousers tied with a cord round the
waist, such as Mussulmans of both sexes wear. In
India the Pyjama was long ago adopted, with a
loose coat to match, as a more decent and comfort-
able costume than the British nightshirt, and when
Anglo-Indians retired they brought the fashion
home with them, English tailors called the whole
costume a ‘‘ Pyjama suit,’ but the second word
was soon dropped and the first improved into the
plural number.

““Shampoo’’ comes from a verb “ champna,’’ to
press or squeeze, and the imperative, ‘‘ champo,”
as often happens, was the form in which it became
English. Forbes, in his Oriental Memoirs, writes
of “the effects of opium, champoing and other
luxuries indulged in by Oriental sensualists.””, When
the medical profession in England began to patronise
the practice, it assumed a more dignified name,
‘massage,’ and the old word was relegated to the
hairdressers, who appropriated it to the washing
of the head, an operation with which the word has
no proper relation at all.

28

192 BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

There are two words of doubtful derivation,
which may be mentioned in this connection. Cot,
in the sense of a light bed, or cradle, is not much
used in England, but is given in Webster’s and other
dictionaries, with the same Saxon derivation, as
the ‘cot beside the hill’? which the poet Rogers
sighed for. If this is correct, then it is at least
curious that the word should have almost gone out
of use in England and revived in India from a dis-
tinct root. There it is the term in every-day use
for any rough bedstead, such as the natives sleep
on and calla khat. The average Englishman cannot
aspirate a K, and never pronounces the Indian A
aright unless it is followed by an R, so khat becomes
“cot” by a process of which there are many illus-
trations.

The other doubtful word mentioned above is
Teapoy. It is defined in the dictionaries as an
ornamental table, with a folding top, containing
caddies for holding tea, but in India, where it is in
much more general use than it is in England, it
signifies simply a light tripod table and almost
certainly comes from “‘ teenpai’’ (three-foot), corre-
sponding to another common word, ‘“ charpai”
(four-foot), which means a native bedstead. The
fact that it is sometimes spelled Tepoy confirms this,
but the other spelling is commoner, and appears to
have led to its getting a special meaning connected
with tea among furniture sellers.

Cheroot, Bangle, Curry and Kidgeree are examples

KIDGEREE AND GYMKHANA 193

of words which have come to us with the things
which they signify, and retain their meaning though
the thing itself may have undergone some change.
Curry as made in England is sometimes not recog-
nisable by a new arrival from India, and Kidgeree is
applied to a preparation of rice and fish, whereas it
means properly a dish of rice, split peas and butter,
or ‘‘ghee.” Fish may be eaten with it, but is not
an ingredient of it. Bazaar may be classed with
these words, and also Polo, which is merely the name
for a polo ball in the language of one of the Hima-
layan tribes from whom we learned the game. It
is said to have been played in England for the first
time at Aldershot in 1871.

More interest attaches to Gymkhana, for neither
the word nor the thing which it signifies is Indian,
though both originated in India, and the derivation
of the word is unknown, though it is scarcely fifty
years old. Several hybrid derivations have been
suggested, none of them probable, and I lean to the
suggestion that the starting-point of the word may
have been “ jumkhana, a term which, though it is
not in Forbes’s Hindustani Dictionary, | have heard
a native apply to a large cotton carpet, such as
native acrobats, or wrestlers, might spread when
about to give a performance. Our use of the words
Arena, Stage, Boards, Footlights, etc., shows how
easily a carpet might give name to a place of meeting
for athletic exercises.

There is another class of words which have come

194 BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

into England through returned Anglo-Indians and
spread by their own merit. One of these is Loot.
The dictionary says that it means “to plunder,’
but it holds more than that or any equivalent
English word. Perhaps it has scarcely risen above
the level of slang yet, but the phrase “to run amuck’’
is classical, having been used by both Pope and
Dryden. The pedantic attempt made by some
writers to change the common way of writing
it because the original Malay term is a single
word, ‘“‘ amok,” comes too late in view of Dryden’s
line,

“ And runs an Indian muck at all he meets.”’

Cheese, in the sense of a thing, or rather of “ the
very thing,” must be ranked as slang too, though
very common. The slang dictionaries give fanciful
derivations from Anglo-Saxon roots, or suggest that
it is a perversion of “chose”; but it is a common
Hindustani word for a thing, and when an English-
man in India finds some article which exactly suits
his purpose and exclaims, ‘“‘ Ah! that’s the cheese,”
no one needs to ask the derivation. If it did not
come to us directly from India, then it came through
the gipsies, for it is one of the many Hindustani
words which occur in their language. Another
word that came from India indirectly is Caste, but
it is of Portuguese origin. The early Portuguese
writers applied it (‘“‘casta’’) to the hereditary
division of Hindu society, and the English adopted

PUNCH AND TODDY 195

it. It has now become indispensable. We have
no other word that could take its place in the lines,

Her manners had not that repose
Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.

I must close with two familiar words which have
been so long with us that few who use them ever
suspect that they came from the East—namely,
Punch and Toddy. The Rev. J. Ovington, who
sailed to Bombay in 1689, in the ship that carried
the glad news of the coronation of William and
Mary, tells us that, in the East India Company’s
chief factory at Surat, the common table was sup-
plied with ‘plenty of generous Sherash (Shiraz)
wine and arak Punch.’ Arrack (properly ‘‘ Urk’’),
sometimes abbreviated to Rack, means any distilled
spirit, or essence, but is commonly used to distin-
guish country liquor from imported spirits. The
Company’s factors drank it because European wines
and beer were at that time very expensive in India,
and to reconcile it to their palates they made it into
a brew called Punch, from the Indian word “ panch,”’
meaning five, because it contained five ingredients—
viz. arrack, hot water, limes, sugar and spice. This
was the ordinary drink of poor Englishmen in India
for a long time, and public ‘“‘ Punch-houses”’ existed
in every settlement of the East India Company.

Now, one of the principal substances from which
country liquor is distilled is palm juice, the native
name for which, ‘“ tadee,’ has been perverted into

196 BORROWED INDIAN WORDS

“toddy”’ (as in the case of “cot”? above-mentioned),
and “toddy punch’? meant the same thing as
“ arrack punch.” Returning Anglo-Indians brought
the receipt for making this brew to England, and
lovers of Vanity Fair will remember how the whole
course of that story was changed by the bowl of
“rack punch”’ which Joseph Sedley ordered at Vaux-
hall, where “everybody had rack punch.’ How
soon both the brew and its Indian name took firm
root and spread among us appears from the fact
that, at the Holy Fair described by Burns in the
century before last, the lads and lasses sit round a
table and “‘ steer about the toddy.”

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