By the measure of money, then, the Bombay mill-hand would seem to be about five times better off than the village labourer of the United Provinces. In so far as most people enjoy living in swarms rather than in isolation, he is better off; but otherwise the lot of both is perhaps almost equally unenviable. The hours in a Bombay mill are spent in monotonous labour, among hideous noise, and in a fluffy atmosphere, where there are no fans to decrease the dust, the heat, or the smell. All round the factories, workmen’s dwellings, or “chawls,” have sprung up, usually in galleries of single rooms along the first floor above a row of open shops. The average rent is one rupee (1_s._ 4_d._) a week for a room, and the whole family lives in one room, in which, as a rule, there is no window but the door. Most families are saved a lot of dusting and breakages by having no furniture except a metal cooking-pot for the rice and dal—a sort of split pea. These are cooked in cocoanut oil, and form the almost invariable food, though in one black hole I did see a woman cooking something that smelt like the ghost of a fish, and sometimes a family launched out into a maize pancake. In one or two rooms there were real decorations—portraits of Rama, of Krishna, or the King—and for a week every doorway was hung with a string of dry leaves, ears of rice, and little crimson flowers like knapweed, in memory, I suppose, of some old village festival. All night long, under a waning moon, the mill hands sat in the verandahs of these wretched homes, beating drums, and chanting their barbaric scales—“praising God,” as they said when we asked them; but what form of God, or for what reason they praised Him, they could not explain. [Illustration: WORKMEN’S DWELLINGS, BOMBAY. [_Face p. 286._ ]