I was so well pleased with my fish investment, bringing in a constant crop of food without labor, worth the product of a number of acres, that I sent for some fishermen with nets to go to the river to bring me a lot of small fish at so much a seer, and they brought me not seers, but maunds, and I waited to see what a harvest my planting would produce, as I told the villagers that the tank was my field. Some of them, I afterwards learned, called the tank, “The Sahib’s Khet.” I found that it was the custom of the people after their evening meal to assemble in front of the school-house at the chibutra, the areopagus of India villages, when the teacher and older scholars would read aloud the papers and books that I had sent them. Questions were put, and various were the discussions, with more courtesy and order than in the British Parliament, when the Irish bill is to the front. These assemblies became so popular that every man, woman and child in the village would be present, not one left to guard a house, for why should there be a guard, when all were at the chibutra? The women had their right to half the space, and well they claimed and kept it. Woe to the wight who dared intrude upon their side. I greatly enjoyed this assertion of rights by the women. I have always been foolish enough to believe that a woman is as good as a man, everywhere and at any time, and most of the time a great deal better. She has her rights and should demand them, even if she has not as much coarse brute muscle as the self styled lords of creation. From my little reading and observation I have come to the conclusion that the moral and social status of a nation, a tribe or individual, is seen by the way they treat their women. If a man, or rather a male of the human species, acts like a hog towards a woman, he is a hog in other respects. I mistrust that this word is not a polite one to use, and that it would be as bad to say hog before some fastidious people, as it would be to say hell in church. But when I mean hog why not say it, and surely I have seen hog bipeds, as well as hog quadrupeds. I cannot help throwing in a suggestion. If I, now an old man, should give any advice to a young woman, about to accept a man for a husband, it would be to see him often with his mother and his sisters, and observe his treatment of them. His murder will out to them, when he would be all smiles and graciousness to women outside his home. In his home he is off his guard, and there is the place to judge these slippery men.