The young rice is taken from the nursery patch, where it has been sown thick some time previously. When the rice-field is ready--a sloppy, muddy, embanked little quagmire--the ryot gets his bundle of young rice-plants, and shoves in two or three at a time with his finger and thumb. These afterwards form the tufts of rice. Its growth is very rapid. Sometimes, in case of flood, the rice actually grows with the rise of the water, always keeping its tip above the stream. If wholly submerged for any length of time it dies. There are over a hundred varieties. Some are only suited for very deep marshy soils; others, such as the _s[=a]tee_, or sixty-days rice, can be grown on comparatively high land, and ripen early. If rain be scanty, the _s[=a]tee_ and other rice crops have to be weeded. It is cut with a jagged-edged sort of reaping-hook called a _hussooa_. The cut bundles are carried from the fields by women, girls, and lads. They could not take carts in many instances into the swamps. At such times you see every little dyke or embankment with a crowd of bustling villagers, each with a heavy bundle of grain on his head, hurrying to and fro like a stream of busy ants. The women, with clothes tucked up above the knee, plod and plash through the water. They go at a half run, a kind of fast trot, and hardly a word is spoken--garnering the rice crops is too important an operation to dawdle and gossip over. Each hurries off with his burden to the little family threshing-floor, dumps down his load, gives a weary grunt, straightens his back, gives a yawn, then off again to the field for another load. It is no use leaving a bundle on the field; where food is so eagerly looked for by such a dense population, where there are hungry mouths and empty stomachs in every village, a bundle of rice would be gone by the morning. As in Greece, where every man has to watch his vineyard at night, so here, the _kureehan_ or threshing-floor each has its watchman at night. For the protection of the growing crops, the villagers club together, and appoint a watchman or _chowkeydar_, whom they pay by giving him a small percentage on the yield; or a small fractional proportion of the area he has to guard, with its standing crop, may be made over to him as a recompense.