plumy-looking plantains almost conceal the huts and buildings. Several
small orchards of mango surround the village; the roads leading to and
from it are merely well-worn cattle tracks,--in the rains a perfect
quagmire, and in the hot weather dusty, and confined between straggling
hedges of aloe or prickly pear. These hedges are festooned with masses
of clinging luxuriant creepers, among which sometimes struggles up a
custard apple, an avocado pear, or a wild plum-tree. The latter is a
prickly straggling tree, called the _bhyre_; the wood is very hard, and
is often used for making ploughs. The fruit is a little hard yellow
crisp fruit, with a big stone inside, and very sweet; when it is ripe,
the village urchins throw sticks up among the branches, and feast on
the golden shower.

On many of the banks bordering the roads, thatching grass, or rather
strong upright waving grass, with a beautiful feathery plume, is
planted. This is used to make the walls of the houses, and these are
then plastered outside and in with clay and cowdung. The tall hedge
of dense grass keeps what little breeze there may be away from the
traveller. The road is something like an Irish 'Boreen,' wanting only
its beauty and freshness. On a hot day the atmosphere in one of these
village roads is stifling and loaded with dust.

These houses with their grass walls and thatched roof are called
_kutcha_, as opposed to more pretentious structures of burnt brick,
with maybe a tiled sloping or flat plastered roof, which are called
_pucca. Pucca_ literally means 'ripe,' as opposed to _cutcha_, 'unripe';
but the rich Oriental tongue has adapted it to almost every kind of
secondary meaning. Thus a man who is true, upright, respected, a man
to be depended on, is called a _pucca_ man. It is a word in constant
use among Anglo-Indians. A _pucca_ road is one which is bridged and
metalled. If you make an engagement with a friend, and he wants to
impress you with its importance, he will ask you, Now is that _pucca_?'
and so on.

Other houses in the village are composed of unburnt bricks cemented
with mud, or maybe composed of mud walls and thatched roof; these,
being a compound sort of erection, are called _cutcha pucca_. In the
_cutcha_ houses live the poorer castes, the _Chumars_ or workers in
leathers, the _Moosahms, Doosadhs_, or _Gwallahs_.

The _Dornes_, or scavengers, feeders on offal, have to live apart in a
_tolah_, which might be called a small suburb,