It was the same with the landless labourers who worked under the ryots for wages. It was the same with the village blind, the village idiots, and the lepers. No one could afford to employ labour now or to give alms. In one village a labourer had scooped a little hole in the ground, and fitted a plantain leaf neatly into it as a bowl for gifts. But charity was as dry as the heavens, and no alms fell. I saw the plantain leaf still vainly appealing, but the man had died of hunger. In another village they were carrying a body to the fire, and they laid the poor, naked thing down for me to see. It was a woman’s body, a labourer’s sister, shrivelled and spiky with hunger, like the skeleton of a starved cat found under the slates. In defence of her brother, the labourer himself, I must say that he was dying of hunger too. The village houses in this part of Orissa, as in most parts of India, are built of mud plastered on to a bamboo framework, with wooden doorposts and rafters. They are thatched with rice straw or palm branches. At the first rush of the flood, the houses dissolved like children’s castles in the tide, and I saw flat and bare plots of land where they had stood. Even the houses that had escaped the water were almost as bare, for the people had been obliged to sell the scanty stock of furniture that Hindu villagers possess—brass pots and plates, a corn bin, cooking vessels, and perhaps a bed—in order to pay the rent which the zemindars or landlords continued to exact, though I was told the officials had ordered a suspension. The native official “tahsildars,” acting as village tax-collectors, had also compelled them to sell everything they had, even to their wooden doorposts, as I said, for paying the “chaukidari” tax (or “tikut,” as they call it) which supports the village police. It is a small tax, paid quarterly, and running from a halfpenny up to 1_s._ 4_d._ a month per house, but the police pay used formerly to be raised from special plots of land set apart in each village for the purpose, and the imposition of a hut-tax for the purpose ten years ago had always been regarded as a grievance. Nor does it matter whether a tax is great or small when you have to sell the family plate, valued at eighteenpence, to pay it. Just before my journey through the country, this tax had also been officially remitted, but it was collected up to a day or two previously, and was always mentioned by the people as one of their most irritating grievances. No one loves a tax-collector, but in time of famine there is something particularly galling in selling one’s property to feed the police for preserving it.