the pelting them with coins. These the
victims would carefully gather from the ground and carry away with them,
thus increasing their hoard and making themselves all the more liable to
popular indignities.

When the cultivated and intelligent Golampi finds himself growing too
wealthy he proceeds to get rid of his surplus riches by some one of many
easy expedients. One of these I have just described; another is to give
his excess to those of his own class who have not sufficient to buy
employment and so escape leisure, which is considered the greatest evil of
all. "Idleness," says one of their famous authors, "is the child of
poverty and the parent of discontent"; and another great writer says: "No
one is without employment; the indolent man works for his enemies."

In conformity to these ideas the Golampis--all but the ignorant and
vicious rich--look upon labor as the highest good, and the man who is so
unfortunate as not to have enough money to purchase employment in some
useful industry will rather engage in a useless one than not labor at all.
It is not unusual to see hundreds of men carrying water from a river and
pouring it into a natural ravine or artificial channel, through which it
runs back into the stream. Frequently a man is seen conveying stones--or
the masses of metal which there correspond to stones--from one pile to
another. When all have been heaped in a single place he will convey them
back again, or to a new place, and so proceed until darkness puts an end
to the work. This kind of labor, however, does not confer the satisfaction
derived from the consciousness of being useful, and is never performed by
any person having the means to hire another to employ him in some
beneficial industry. The wages usually paid to employers are from three to
six _balukan_ a day. This statement may seem incredible, but I solemnly
assure the reader that I have known a bad workman or a feeble woman to pay
as high as eight; and there have been instances of men whose incomes had
outgrown their desires paying even more.

Labor being a luxury which only those in easy circumstances can afford,
the poor are the more eager for it, not only because it is denied them,
but because it is a sign of respectability. Many of them, therefore,
indulge in it on credit and soon find themselves deprived of what little
property they had to satisfy their hardfisted employers. A poor woman once
complained to me that her husband spent every _ry