ou have just to arrange your "jaolees" neatly on your bamboo frame,
each overlapping the one below it, then tie them securely in their
places with coir rope and your roof is made for a year.

There is yet another benevolence of the coconut tree which I have left
to the last, and the simple folk of whom I am trying to write with
fellow feeling would certainly have named it first. I ought to refer to
it as a curse: they, without qualm or question, call it a blessing. Let
me try to describe it dispassionately. If you wander in any palm grove
in Western India, looking upward, it will soon strike you that a large
number of the trees do not seem to bear coconuts at all, but black
earthen pots. If your visit should chance to be made early in the
morning, or late in the afternoon, the mystery will soon be revealed.
You will see a dusky, sinewy figure, not of a monkey, but of a man,
ascending and descending those trees with marvellous celerity and ease,
grasping the trunks with his hands and fitting his naked feet into
slight notches cut in them. The distance between the notches is so great
that his knee goes up to his chin at each step, but he is as supple as
he is sinewy and feels no inconvenience. For he is a Bhundaree, or
Toddy-drawer, and his forefathers have been Bhundarees since the time, I
suppose, when Manu made his immortal laws.

His waistcloth is tightly girded about him, in his hand he carries a
broad billhook as bright and keen as a razor, and from his caudal region
depends a tail more strange than any borne by beast or reptile. It looks
like a large brown pot, constructed in the middle. It is, in fact, a
large gourd, or calabash, hanging by a hook from the climber's
waistband. When he has reached the top of a tree, he gets among the
branches and, sitting astride of one of them, proceeds to detach one of
the black pots from the stout fruit stem on which it is fastened, and
empty its contents into his tail. Then, taking his billhook, he
carefully pares the raw end of the stem, refastens the black pot in its
place and hurries down to make the ascent of another tree, and so on
until his tail is full of a foaming white liquor spotted with drowned
honey bees and filling the surrounding air with a rank odour of
fermentation. This liquor is "toddy."

If I were a Darwin I would not leave that word until I had traced the
agencies which wafted it over sea and land from the shores of Hindustan
to the Scottish coast, where i