nor are one-tenth of the villages peopled. The
soil is really the finest that I have seen in India; and I have seen
no part of India in which so small a portion of the surface is unfit
for tillage. The moisture rises to the surface just as it is
required; and a tolerable crop is got by a poor man who cannot afford
to keep a plough, and merely burns down the grass and digs the
surface with his spade, or pickaxe, before he sows the seed.
Generally, however, the tillage, in the portion cultivated, is very
good. The surface is ploughed and cross-ploughed from six to twenty,
or even thirty, times in the season; and the harrow and roller are
often applied till every clod is pulverized to dust.

The test of first-rate preparation for the seed is that a ghurra, or
earthen pitcher, full of water, let fall upon the field from a man's
head, shall not break. The clods in the muteear soil are so
pulverised only in the fields that are to be irrigated, or to the
surface of which moisture rises from below as the weather becomes
warm. The people say that it does so rise when required in land even
a good way from the forest, and that the clods are, in consequence,
not necessary to retain it. This is the only part of India in which I
have known the people take ratoon, or second crops of sugar-cane from
the same roots; and the farmers and cultivators tell me that the
second crop is almost as good as the first. The fields in tillage are
well supplied with manure, which is very abundant where so large a
portion of the surface is waste; and affords such fine pasture. They
are also well watered, for the water is near the surface, and in the
tight muteear soil a kutcha well, or well without masonry, will stand
good for twenty seasons. To make pucka-wells, or wells lined with
burnt bricks and cement, would be costly. Each well of this kind
costs about one hundred rupees. The kutcha-wells, which are lined
with nothing, or with thick ropes of twigs and straw, cost only from
five to ten rupees. The people tell me that oppression and poverty
have made them less fastidious than they were formerly; that formerly
it was considered disgraceful to plough with buffaloes, or to use
them in carts, but they are now in common use for both purposes; that
vast numbers of the Kunojee Brahmins and others, who could not
formerly drive their own ploughs, drive them now; and that all will
in time condescend to do so, as the penalties of higher payments with
and fo