“Why on earth did you sleep there?” I asked; “there was plenty of room inside.” “I’m a Famine official, and I have been living inside for some nights past,” he answered. “But when I got back at nine o’clock last night, I found you were reading in one room and your boy had gone to sleep in the other, so I stayed out here.” “My boy!” I said. “Why, he sleeps everywhere! On the floor of my room, at the door—anywhere! Why didn’t you come in?” “Well, you see,” he answered, with hesitation, “I saw you were an Englishman, and I knew that if I had come in, you’d have kicked me out, and I didn’t want to be kicked out. That’s why.” As I had been three months in India, I was not surprised, but as a patriot I found it hard to reply, so I turned the conversation to Famine and Relief. We were in the United Provinces, where that season’s famine was particularly bad. Mr. Theodore Morison has explained that in India the word “famine” is now equivalent only to a “suspension of agricultural industry.”[53] “Now that the relief of the unemployed is undertaken by Government,” he says, “it is not a fact that any considerable proportion of the people die of hunger when the agricultural industry is interrupted.” In the United Provinces, then, agricultural industry was suspended, and the cause of the suspension was obvious. For close on four and a half months not a drop of rain had fallen, and day after day the sun rose and set in a sky as clear and hard as steel. Rain ought to have lasted well into October, and in December to have begun again, and here was the second week in January without a drop since August. The December harvest was lost, and the ground so hard that scarcely a quarter of the usual crops had been sown for the greater harvest due in March. The horror of past famines is easily obliterated in India, for what would you expect of a people to whom history is but a sleep and a forgetting? But men who had known the course of Indian famines since the seventies told me that unless rain came within a fortnight that year’s famine would be worse than any that India had ever suffered.[54] [Illustration: A BULLOCK WELL. [_Face p. 272._ ]