Now, thanks to good administration, the feeding is all finished in about three hours. I was struck on the whole with the aspect of the people; they all with few exceptions looked well and in good condition. However, the Inspector said, had I seen them when they first came, it was different, and that if they were to return to their own villages, they would be dead in a few days. In fact, all the villages round are empty. Rice has now reached the appalling price of three and a half measures for the rupee, and of course one has to pay all one's servants extra. The poor cannot live, and they say the famine is getting worse! Only one man did I see who was lying among the others. Poor fellow! he had just managed to crawl into camp, and he was dying. I ordered him to be removed to the Hospital, a living skeleton. 'The Hospital was truly a sad sight, the saddest I ever saw. There in one ward, lying on the floor, were a dozen beings, literally living skeletons, with sunken eyes, and ghastly hollow cheeks, and livid lips, with their bones almost protruding through the flesh; too ill to move, and barely able to turn their glassy, stony stare upon you. Yes, dying all from starvation, and being hourly brought nearer death by wasting diarrhœa or dysentery. 'One woman I shall never forget. She had her back to me, and her shoulder-blade stood out so fearfully that I gazed upon it in momentary expectation of its coming through the skin. So awful was it, that I felt almost tempted to take my nail and scrape it, in order to see the white of the bone. Perhaps the saddest sight of all was the lying-in ward, where a lean mother was to be seen unable from weakness to nurse the bag of bones she had given birth to; barely a child surely, with its huge head and sunken eyes and its projecting wee ribs. Poor infant, it couldn't live long.' '_August 7._--This morning I was up at five, and after my breakfast of porridge and goat's milk, was driving out to Jeramuchi Famine Relief Camp, eleven and a half miles distant. The camp is much the same as the Palaveram one I already described to you; but it is superior, and more luxurious in some ways. It is not built in the form of a square, and is all the better of that, I think. It is fenced in all round with a trim palisading, as was the other camp, sufficient to prevent the people straying at night. The chuppers are arranged on the pavilion system, right down the centre of the camp. During the day they are entirely open at both sides, therein differing from the Palaveram ones, where one side is always closed. However, at night either side can be closed, as the sides consist of pieces of matting on a wooden framework, which is hinged to the side of the roof; and during the day the sides are all put up, supported on two bamboos each.