First I went up the line to a place called Balasore, and late at night visited two Settlement Camps, where a revision of land-titles was slowly going on, in view of the next great Settlement which was to take place in twenty years’ time. It was a recent idea of Sir Andrew Fraser, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, who with Scottish providence aimed at thus reducing the work that would await his fourth successor in office for the year or two before the next Settlement came. It is true that the present revision would require further revisions before then, but that did not matter. With this laudable object, Indian officials were seated in their tents, and just visible by lanterns a crowd of forty or fifty small holders from neighbouring villages were gathered round them, all clutching their precious title-deeds to their bosoms. For six days they had been waiting there from nine in the morning to eleven at night, just at the time when harvest needed them most. An official told me it took about a month to complete the revision in a circle of twenty-one villages, and the work never stopped but for the rains. Outside one tent an enterprising shopkeeper had opened a little store of plantains, rice, and cakes to feed the patient crowd. Some were little boys whose fathers had died, some represented widows. So under the dispensation of Scottish providence they waited, and one can only hope that the officials of eighteen or nineteen years hence will think of them kindly while enjoying the far-off interest of their tears. [Illustration: MY ELEPHANT.] [Illustration: A VILLAGE CROWD. [_Face p. 140._ ] Next day I returned to Jenapur, and mounted a large elephant, which, sad to say, could heartily enjoy a daily meal that would keep any Hindu in prime condition for six weeks. As upon a watch-tower, for the next few days I passed up and down the long line of flat country that had been flooded beside the Brahmani, sometimes crossing over into the basin of the Kharsua, another of the uncertain rivers that alternately save and devastate the land. Where it was not devastated, the country was thickly cultivated in little fields of rice, pulse, and a kind of millet, and the numbers of planted mango-trees gave it much the same look as an elm-row part of Essex or the Midlands. Throughout the district rice was certainly the staple crop, because, though it is so risky and wants so much water, its yield is magnificent when it yields at all; and it was one of the ironies of India that, while here the land had been ruined by the deluge of rain, on the way up from Madras I passed through miles on miles of rice fields where the crops stood dying of drought, or were already cut as straw for thatch or as fodder for the sacred cow. Even here the drought had been so severe since the flood that the inferior crops of grain and pulse had failed and could not be used to alleviate the distress.