which are grazed
upon it in great numbers. Several bullocks have been killed and eaten
by them within the last few days; and an old fakeer, who has for some
months taken up his lodging on this side the river under a peepul-
tree, in a straw hut just big enough to hold him, told us that he
frequently saw them come down to drink in the stream near his
lodging. We saw a great many deer in passing, but no tigers. The soil
near the river is sandy, and the ground uneven, but still cultivable;
and on this side of the sandy belt it is all level and of the best
kind of doomuteea. Our tents are in a fine grove of mango-trees, in
the midst of a waste, but level and extensive, plain of this soil,
not a rood of which is unfit for the plough or incapable of yielding
crops of the finest quality. It is capable of being made, in two or
three years, a beautiful garden.

The single trees, which are scattered all over it, have been shorn of
their leaves and small branches by the cowherds for their cattle, but
they would all soon clothe themselves again under protection. The
groves are sufficiently numerous to furnish sites for the villages
and hamlets required. All the large sakhoo-trees have been cut down
and taken away on the ground we have come over, which is too near the
river for them to be permitted to attain full size. Not an acre or a
foot of the land is oosur, or unfit for tillage. Poknapoor is in the
estate of Etowa, which forms part of the pergunnah of Peepareea, to
which Bahadur Sing, the person above described, lays claim. He holds
a few villages round his residence at Pursur; but the pergunnah is
under the management of a Government officer, under the Amil of
Mahomdee. The Rajah, Syud Ashruf Allee Khan, of Mahomdee, claims a
kind of suzerainty over all the district, and over this pergunnah of
Peepareea among the rest. From all the villages tilled and peopled he
is permitted to levy an income for himself at the rate of two rupees
a-village. This the people pay with some reluctance, though they
recognise his right.

The zumeendars of Poknapoor are Kunojee Brahmins, who tell me that
they can do almost everything in husbandry save holding their own
ploughs: they can drive their own harrows and carts, reap their own
crops, and winnow and tread out their own corn; but if they once
condescend to _hold their own ploughs_ they sink in grade, and have
to pay twice as much as they now pay for wives for their sons from
the same famil