But rice is, in India, the staff of life, being used to a greater extent than any grain in Europe. It is, in fact, the food of the highest and the lowest, the principal harvest of every climate. Its production, generally speaking, is only limited by the means of irrigation, which is essential to its growth. The ground is prepared in March and April; the seed is sown in May and reaped in August. If circumstances are favourable there are other harvests, one between July and November, another between January and April. These also sometimes consist of rice, but more commonly of other grain or pulse. In some parts millet is used as food. Many are the ways of cooking rice—there are powder of cucumber seeds and rice, lime juice and rice, orange juice and rice, jack fruit and rice, rice and milk, and sweet cakes made of rice flour, with or without green ginger. The Bombay baker is a man of a different stamp altogether to the Bengal baker. He is invariably a Goanese and a native Christian, and adopts his profession not from choice but by heredity. For generations past his fathers have been bakers, and have, in accordance with the rules of the Society of Bakers, to which they must have belonged, studied some portion at least of the art of manufacturing bread. The Bombay baker is, moreover, a man of substance. To begin with, he grows his own wheat, and has it conveyed to his factories, where as many as 200 hands are employed in converting it into raw material for cooking. He retains a staff of _chefs_, who also hail from Goa, and who attend exclusively to the baking. Greater comparative intelligence and a love for his trade enable him to turn out a far superior article to that of his ignorant contemporary in Upper India; but even in Bombay the same fault has to be found with the manufacturer: either the bread is too fine, or it is too ‘brown’—that is, it contains too much bran. CHAPTER VI. BREAD IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala, who lived in the first half of the 16th century, has left behind him, in his _Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus_, a long and lucid account of Scandinavian life and manners. Respecting harvest, he tells us that in the Northern countries, in many fields of the Visigoths, on that part that lies southward, barley is ripe and mown in 36 days from the date of sowing—that is, from the end of June to the middle of August, and sometimes sooner; and other corn sown in the beginning of May is reaped in the middle of August—‘by the mutual help of the countrymen, not with any great pains, but with alacrity and willing minds, lest cold wind should blow upon it and blast the corn. And they desire no other reward for their daily labour than a merry feast at night, where the young people of both sexes, by reason of their faithful labours in the field, by the judgment, consent, and permission of their provident parents, are made choice of for to be married.’