At certain times of the year the indigo-planter has rather a hard-worked life. In what may be termed the spring-time, when the plant is growing, he must be up with the dawn for a long ride through the fields to see that the cultivators are looking properly after their work. The hot and blazing sun rises, but he heeds it little, as his anxious eyes are bent on noting any changes for good or bad that may have occurred in the crop since he last rode in this direction. He does not, however, disdain the shelter of a friendly tree, if so be that his course is arrested by a party of anxious villagers who seek his advice or orders about the right to use some water for irrigation, or to fish in some particular pond, or to settle some minute question of caste—such, for instance, as the grave question whether some new arrival is entitled to be shaved by the village barber. I have sat for more than an hour with a planter listening to all the earnest arguments submitted for his decision on this point. Sometimes also, his ride may be interrupted by less peaceable demonstrations, for an aggressive neighbour may have trespassed on his cultivated lands, or he may find a hostile force arrayed to prevent him from ploughing certain fields to which he considers himself entitled. Fortunately the stand-up fights of armed retainers, which were not uncommon years ago, are now almost unknown, and those who are wisest in their generation now are careful to avoid any recourse to force in settling their disputes with their neighbours. At length the morning round is finished, and he gallops home through the fiery sunshine, giving his horse the benefit of a little practice at a few jumps over any banks and ditches that lie conveniently in his path. As he rides up to his house the children and the “placens uxor” appear, probably to chide him for being so late out in the hot sun, as it seems to be the first duty of a good wife always to remind her husband that he ought to take more care of himself. Probably, however, the lady is anxious for her breakfast; whilst the children, who have had their breakfast, are only too glad to welcome their father and to follow him into his dressing-room to have their little talk with him, and to watch all the mysterious operations of dressing which seem to have such a fascination for children. In India each little child of two or three years old has its own special man or boy servant in charge of it, so that the children can be still cared for in their father’s dressing-room, which might be not quite so convenient in England, where children are in charge of nurses. But when their father has bathed and dressed, the children lead him out into the breakfast-room, and, probably having got some spoil from the breakfast-table, they retire to their mid-day slumbers and are seen no more.