s, and find it most
useful. The water, I may add, should be carefully conducted to the various
terraces, just as if they were to be cultivated with rice, this, as I need
hardly say, being necessary for the snipe. Amongst these scraps of hints,
which may be useful, I may mention the fact that tealeries were once
common in India. I am told that they are easily established, though I
have, myself, no experience of them. It is sometimes possible to add to
the amenities of an estate by reserving pieces of land for tigers to lie
up in, and this is very important, now that every scrap of land is being
taken up for planting either coffee or cardamoms, and that cover for game
is becoming proportionately scarce. There are two such pieces that I have
reserved on my estate for tigers, but care must be taken beforehand to see
that such reserves are on the exact route by which tigers cross from one
part of the country to another. For instance, the pieces I have reserved
are about three miles apart, and I have never known or heard of a tiger
being between them excepting on one occasion last year, when a royal tiger
inspected a cattle shed of mine about five minutes' walk from the house.
At first sight it seems singular that these animals, like hares, should
have their runs, and still more that the runs should be so regularly
adhered to, though they may be several miles apart.

In concluding this chapter, and my remarks on planting, I have only to
observe that, if a planter chooses to take an interest in everything that
is going on around him, and learns to make himself at home in the country,
he will find the life both interesting and agreeable. In former times
there was, no doubt, a sense of remoteness in the situation, but that, as
we have seen, has been considerably removed by the railway extensions of
recent years; and when the proposed lines, to which I have alluded in my
introductory chapter, are carried out, planters, during the unimportant
seasons of the year, may reside either at Bangalore or on the Nilgiri
hills (the climate of the latter, taking it all the year round, is the
finest in the world), and yet be in full touch with their affairs.

Finally, I may observe that in Mysore we have the great advantage of being
out of reach of the faddists of the House of Commons, who, for the sake of
their votes, have to be humoured, whether the interests of India suffer or
not. There is no chance, for instance, of the opium faddists thr