As I rode along day by day busy with my sketch I had not time to feel lonely; though, with the exception of my brief stay in Jalpaiguri, I had not exchanged a word with one of my own colour for over a week. But in India one grows accustomed to that. Soldiers, planters, forest and civil officers are used to being cut off from their kind; and on detachment I have passed months without seeing another European. The evenings, when the day's work is done, are the hardest to bear; and now in this long and solitary ride, when I sat in my tent or a _dâk_ bungalow after dinner by the flickering light of a hurricane lantern I did occasionally wish for a white man to talk to. My road, running parallel to the hills, crossed many rivers flowing from them. Most of these were, at that season of the year, easily fordable; though in some the water was up to my pony's girths. Warned by my experience at the Tista, I kept a sharp look-out for quicksands. At one broad stream villagers bade me beware of crocodiles; and fording a river in which these brutes lurk is not a pleasant task. The crocodiles of India are divided into two species. The _ghavial_, or fish eater, attains a length of eighteen feet and is reputed not to attack human beings. Yet with their long, narrow snouts studded with a serrated row of sharp teeth they look much more formidable than the man-eating, blunt-nosed _muggers_. The latter are similar to the alligators of the New World and the crocodiles of Africa, though they do not reach the length of the latter. The largest I have known was an old veteran twelve and a half feet long, which I shot in the Jumna near its confluence with the Ganges at Allahabad. The latter river is full of _muggers_; but the former is reputed locally to contain only _ghavials_. My crocodile may have been a stray. From a boat in which I was drifting down stream I saw it, looking like an immense log, lying on the bank; for these brutes are in the habit of coming ashore to sun themselves during the heat of the day. They are not easy to shoot, as at the least sign of danger they are prone to dive into the river. Even if wounded they are hard to secure; for they nearly always lie at the water's edge, so that the least movement takes them into the stream and, if they die below the surface, their bodies do not float for some time.