The process of constructing the dams was simple. Engineers had fixed the required levels and breadths by upright poles with strings stretched between them, and all that the workers had to do was to pile up earth till the strings were just covered and disappeared from sight. The earth was cut from both sides of the dam, and each digger’s daily task, with the help of a woman carrier, was to clear a plot of earth 13 ft. by 8 ft., and 1 ft. deep. A pick and hoe were supplied by Government, but the natives refused the new English-made tools, not from any Swadeshi prejudice, but because they were rotten and would not cut. Women carried the earth in baskets made in the gaols and threw it on the dam. Weaker women, cripples and children broke up the clods, patting them rather gently with wooden implements till the surface was fairly smooth and solid. That was all the work. If the allotted task fell short, the payment of the whole gang of fellow-villagers was reduced, so that each worker had an interest in keeping all his friends up to the mark, and I did not hear any complaints about reductions. What I did hear were the common complaints of humanity that bellies were not full, that dealers gave short weight, and that some parts of the ground were harder to dig than others. By that time there were twenty thousand workers on relief in this small district alone, and the numbers were daily increasing. When people have to be saved by averages of thousands together, how can you stop to give complete satisfaction? It is not so that heaven is filled. The hope was that, as the famine had been taken in time, the cholera, which comes in the rearward of famine, might be avoided; and it was. The only definite disease I noticed was a very common paralysis of the knees, which crippled both men and women, but was not directly due to famine. The people themselves attributed it to a kind of pea they eat, and the pea had lately been forbidden to be sold on Government works. I had seen the same kind of paralysis in the stone quarries at Les Baux in Provence, where it was attributed to the dust; but it seems hard to connect the two cases. Otherwise, the people were as healthy as one can be on an average of 1½_d._ a day. Most of them went back to their own villages in the evening. For those who lived too far away tiny huts or coverts of bamboo frames thatched with straw were provided. When the dams were finished, they were to be “departmentally watched and maintained.”