Houses built by English missionaries for Indian mission workers are, as a rule, not at all the kind of abode which the tenants really like. A row of cottages, built some years ago in Poona City for Indian Christians, has never been popular; chiefly because, besides many doors and windows, there are ventilators in the roof which cannot be closed. In more than one mission school some of the doors and windows have had to be permanently bricked up, because both teachers and children complained so much of the cold. Visions of tidy cottages for Indian Christians gradually get dispelled. Here and there a home-like dwelling is to be found, but they are scarce. A young married girl, who had been brought up in refined surroundings and had an unusually comfortable home when first married, had to live for a time in the open sheds and apparent discomfort of a plague camp. Instead of disliking it she settled in with great contentment, cooked her own dinner in the open, and was evidently more at home than in her well-built house. This also, as time went on, gradually lost its original look of comfort. Hens, and goats, and cow-dung cakes, and rubbish of all sorts by degrees got the upper hand, and proportionate to the increase of apparent discomfort was the increase of contentment in the minds of the young couple who lived there. CHAPTER XXXVII UNFINISHED PLANS IN INDIA Houses begun and never completed. The projected laundry. Abandoned wells. Shunker sinks a well; he gets tired of it; failure of his second well; begins again at his first well; destructive blasting operations; finally gives up the plan. The marks left of projects begun but never finished is a common and discouraging sight in India. There is scarcely a village which does not bear evidence of this. A man prepares to build a new house. You are astonished at the large blocks of stone, neatly cut and well laid, with which he commences. If you ask him about it, he will tell you of the beautiful superstructure which is to come on the top of the plinth which he is now building. But after a while the work begins to slacken; the men employed gradually diminish in number. You ask the cause, and various reasons will be assigned--scarcity of stone, lack of water, and the like. Finally the work ceases, probably never to be resumed. The owner has got tired of the project, or, not having counted the cost, the treasury has run dry. Sometimes after a long delay, he will build a miserable mud-house on the top of his handsome stone plinth. But in innumerable villages you will find examples of unfinished houses which have remained in that condition for generations.