On the hills and in the forests of the Rewa Kántha States and Mewár, however, the Bhils are seen at their best--sporting, loyal, happy wildmen of the woods. They have no villages like the Hindu plainsmen--close-crowded and ill-smelling. Each family has its own homestead in the clearing, a hut of logs grass-thatched, overgrown by the creeper-gourd with its yellow flowers. The men are skilled in the use of bow and arrow and love to roam the forests after game. They follow the tracks by which wild animals move at dawn from the valleys, and they know each lair or water-hole. The women also know the forest, where they collect grass seeds to be ground to flour, and where they gather the luscious fleshy flower of the mhowra tree to cook into cakes or distil into fiery liquor. They keep large numbers of cattle and every homestead has its own fowls and chickens. Two enemies only prey upon them, the leopard who seizes the grazing calf, and the anopheles mosquito which injects into their blood the malaria that ages and kills them early. For the rest while the years are good and the seasons kindly and the rain comes in good time and falls sufficiently, they are happy and free from care. But when there is scarcity, they die of famine, save for the relief brought to their doors by British administration. Among the hill tribes, where they still distinguish themselves from the Hindus, the Bhil woman has much freedom. When she has long passed puberty, at seventeen say or eighteen, she marries pretty much as she pleases. They are, in a pale copy of the Rajput feudal chivalry, divided into clans and have the religious prohibition of marriage within the clan. The girl must, therefore, choose a husband from another family. But the clan descents are rather vague and blurred, and the prohibition does not in practice hamper their choice seriously. Outside of this limit, at any rate, they marry with their heart. Only the intending bridegroom must make the girl’s father a customary payment of money or of cattle, often stolen in a raid from some lowland village. If he cannot pay, however, he has the option of doing seven years’ service in the father’s house, as Jacob did for Leah. During that time he is free of the girl, though he is not fully married till the end, and he lives in the house more as a dependent poor relation than a servant. Till they are married, the girls are not expected to be too strictly virtuous. While they are young, their sport with neighbours’ boys is merely smiled at indulgently as “the play of children.” Even when they have ripened to real womanhood--“and then Chloe first learnt that what had happened near the forest was but the play of shepherds”--they still wear the white bodice which shows them to be girls unclaimed by any man, and no one looks too closely to their actions. When once, however, they have chosen their husband and settled down to marriage, it is rare indeed that there be thought of any other man.