[Water supply.] Springs issuing from the side of the hill below the village supply Lhotas with their water. Sometimes it is drawn from a muddy pool of unappetizing greenish water, but often there is a good flow into a basin dammed up with rough masonry. Small fish have been put into the Niroyo basin, and are carefully preserved in order that they may keep the water clear of scum. At almost all springs there is a small dam, and over it a low fence so that women who draw water stand below and not in the supply from which they draw. Unlike the Ao, the Lhota does not fancy water after the village have washed their feet in it. When the path from the fields does not happen to pass near a stream, water is often led to it in bamboo pipes from a long distance in order that men coming up after the day’s work may have a drink and a wash. The Lhota House. [Description.] A Lhota house varies in size from the wretched hovel of some old widow to the house of a rich man which may measure thirty feet long by eighteen feet broad—a limit far exceeded, however, by Aos, Semas and Angamis. To build a fine house as a show of wealth a Lhota would regard as great waste of money, and a Lhota likes to waste nothing. The walls are of bamboo and the roof of thatch (lishu) or palm-leaf (oko, Levistonia assamica). The front of all but the poorest houses is semicircular, with a door in the middle of the semicircle. The roof of the front semicircular room (mpongki) slopes up to the roof of the main building like the roof of the semicircular apse of a church. The upper roof-tree of the main building is carried forward over the roof of the mpongki with a slight upward slope, and is decorated with a little mock roof of thatch forming a sort of flying gable. In the middle of the mpongki is a bamboo post, which is carried through the roof of the apse to meet the projecting roof-tree of the main building. The interior of a Lhota house strikes a stranger as very cramped and uncomfortable. Unless one is very careful one bumps one’s head at every step. There is none of the spaciousness which one notices in the house of a rich Sema or Ao. Where the ground is suitable and bamboos are plentiful there is a machan (khantsung) for sitting out at the back. Sometimes the whole floor of the house is simply levelled earth, as in a Sema or Angami house. More usually, however, a step made of a short, thick log leads up from the mpongki to the doorway of the main building, the floor of which is raised above the ground on short posts and made of stout bamboo matting on a framework of whole bamboos, the matting in turn being covered with a layer of beaten earth to keep the draught from coming up from below. The floor of the sitting-out platform at the back is of bamboo without any covering of earth. The pattern of the floor of this platform varies according to whether the owner of the house has or has not dragged a stone. In the former case a