Coming twenty or thirty miles south of the Jumna from Allahabad, where the Jumna and Ganges join, I had passed through a country that became continually more desert. It was nearly flat, and rather thickly covered with isolated thorns and the heavy mango trees, which yield a fruit much sought after by the villagers, but now regarded as a chief cause of cholera in famine time. So far, the trees had not been stript bare for fodder, as I afterwards saw them round Delhi, and the cattle were still kept from the unholy butcher’s hands by a diet of chopped millet stalks, with linseed for the milkers. The land was divided into tiny fields, about the size of one to four tennis-courts, marked off by earthen banks, along the top of which there is a right of way. Round the mud villages, wherever the wells still held water, some of these fields were green with potatoes or young wheat, or a tall bushy pulse with yellow flower, and all day long the ryots were busy distributing the precious water through little channels among the crops. I suppose no form of irrigation surpasses the wells in value, though very many of them are sunk only temporarily in times of drought, on account of the expense of sinking a “pukka” or masonry shaft. As in most parts of India that I visited, the water is usually drawn up in one or two large bags by bullocks harnessed to the end of a rope and driven down a steep incline. But many of the wells were dry, and so were many of the tanks or public ponds, which, having originally supplied most of the mud for the village habitations, afterwards become the social centres of village life. In fact, the only tank I saw with a plentiful supply of water left was one that three crocodiles had wisely selected for their home. They were not so large as the dragonish monsters I had shot at in West Africa, but large enough to disturb the social centre of any English green. Two or three hundred yards away from the village wells the little squares and oblongs of fields were absolutely bare, not a weed showing. For miles on miles the drab surface of the earth was hard and barren as a brick pavement.