remove the fish, renew baits, and keep the punkah in
constant swing. There I used to sit enjoying my cigar, and pulling in
little fish at the rate sometimes of a couple a minute.

I remember hooking a turtle once, and a terrible job it was to land
him. My light rod bent like a willow, but the tackle was good, and
after ten minutes' hard work I got the turtle to the side, where my
boys soon secured him. He weighed thirteen pounds. Sometimes you get
among a colony of freshwater crabs.

They are little brown brutes, and strip your hooks of the bait as fast
as you fling them in. There is nothing for it in such a case but to
shift your station. Many of the bottom fish--the _ghurai_, the
_saourie_, the _barnee_ (eel), and others, make no effort to escape the
hook. You see them resting at the bottom, and drop the bait at their
very nose. On the whole, the hand fishing is uninteresting, but it
serves to wile away an odd hour when hunting and shooting are hardly
practicable.

Particular occupations in India are restricted to particular castes.
All trades are hereditary. For example, a _tatmah_, or weaver, is
always a weaver. He cannot become a blacksmith or carpenter. He has no
choice. He must follow the hereditary trade. The peculiar system of
land-tenure in India, which secures as far as possible a bit of land
for every one, tends to perpetuate this hereditary selection of trades,
by enabling every cultivator to be so far independent of his
handicraft, thus restricting competition. There may be twenty _lohars_,
or blacksmiths, in a village, but they do not all follow their calling.
They till their lands, and are _de facto_ petty farmers. They know the
rudiments of their handicraft, but the actual blacksmith's work is done
by the hereditary smith of the village, whose son in turn will succeed
him when he dies, or if he leave no son, his fellow caste men will put
in a successor.

Nearly every villager during the rains may be found on the banks of the
stream or lake, angling in an amateur sort of way, but the fishermen
of Behar _par excellence_ are the _mull[=a]hs_; they are also called
_Gouhree, Beeu_, or _Muchooah_. In Bengal they are called _Nikaree_,
and in some parts _Baeharee_, from the Persian word for a boat. In the
same way _muchooah_ is derived from _much_, a fish, and _mullah_ means
boatman, strictly speaking, rather than fisherman. All boatmen and
fishermen belong to this caste, and their villages can be recognis