They are little brown brutes, and strip your hooks of the bait as fast as you fling them in. There is nothing for it in such a case but to shift your station. Many of the bottom fish--the _ghurai_, the _saourie_, the _barnee_ (eel), and others, make no effort to escape the hook. You see them resting at the bottom, and drop the bait at their very nose. On the whole, the hand fishing is uninteresting, but it serves to wile away an odd hour when hunting and shooting are hardly practicable. Particular occupations in India are restricted to particular castes. All trades are hereditary. For example, a _tatmah_, or weaver, is always a weaver. He cannot become a blacksmith or carpenter. He has no choice. He must follow the hereditary trade. The peculiar system of land-tenure in India, which secures as far as possible a bit of land for every one, tends to perpetuate this hereditary selection of trades, by enabling every cultivator to be so far independent of his handicraft, thus restricting competition. There may be twenty _lohars_, or blacksmiths, in a village, but they do not all follow their calling. They till their lands, and are _de facto_ petty farmers. They know the rudiments of their handicraft, but the actual blacksmith's work is done by the hereditary smith of the village, whose son in turn will succeed him when he dies, or if he leave no son, his fellow caste men will put in a successor. Nearly every villager during the rains may be found on the banks of the stream or lake, angling in an amateur sort of way, but the fishermen of Behar _par excellence_ are the _mull[=a]hs_; they are also called _Gouhree, Beeu_, or _Muchooah_. In Bengal they are called _Nikaree_, and in some parts _Baeharee_, from the Persian word for a boat. In the same way _muchooah_ is derived from _much_, a fish, and _mullah_ means boatman, strictly speaking, rather than fisherman. All boatmen and fishermen belong to this caste, and their villages can be recognised at once by the instruments of their calling lying all around.