e to make those commonplace kindly inquiries about
a neighbour's wife or daughter which European courtesy demands from mere
acquaintances. This family privacy is maintained at any price. During
the famine of 1866 it was found impossible to render public charity
available to the female members of the respectable classes, and many a
rural household starved slowly to death without uttering a complaint or
making a sign.

"All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The
husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture;
they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till
at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of
trees and the grass of the field; and in June, 1770, the Resident at the
Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead. Day and night
a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the
great cities. At an early period of the year pestilence had broken out.
In March we find small-pox at Moorshedabad, where it glided through
the vice-regal mutes, and cut off the Prince Syfut in his palace. The
streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead.
Interment could not do its work quick enough; even the dogs and jackals,
the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their
revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at
length threatened the existence of the citizens..... In 1770, the rainy
season brought relief, and before the end of September the province
reaped an abundant harvest. But the relief came too late to avert
depopulation. Starving and shelterless crowds crawled despairingly
from one deserted village to another in a vain search for food, or a
resting-place in which to hide themselves from the rain. The epidemics
incident to the season were thus spread over the whole country; and,
until the close of the year, disease continued so prevalent as to form
a subject of communication from the government in Bengal to the Court
of Directors. Millions of famished wretches died in the struggle to live
through the few intervening weeks that separated them from the harvest,
their last gaze being probably fixed on the densely-covered fields that
would ripen only a little too late for them..... Three months later,
another bountiful harvest, the great rice-crop of the year, was gathered
in. Abundance returned to Bengal as suddenly as famine had swooped do