tantly leaving in our rear. The theory of the driver
of the car was that, if bullocks are frightened, the best course is to
dash past quickly and get it over. The result was not altogether a
success. The fact that a horrible monster had sped by was sufficient
to produce panic, and the first impulse of the bullock was to rush off
the road to some place of safety. In India it is easy to go off the
track at any point, because there is often neither wall nor hedge, and
the surrounding country may be uneven and intersected with beds of
streams and deep hollows.

In the course of our journey I saw a bullock-cart swerve off the road
and fall bottom upwards into a field on a much lower level. Anyone
unfamiliar with bullock-cart accidents would expect much more
disastrous results from such a mishap than was probably actually the
case; but I saw the tragedy when we were already far ahead, and our
driver of course never saw it at all. Consternation was excited in the
traffic ahead of us by the hoot of the car. Drivers, who had already
experienced the effect of a motor-car on their beasts, leapt from
their cart, and hastily urging the bullocks to the side of the road,
stood in front of them and blind-folded their eyes with their garments
so that they might not see the apparition tearing by. After a little
familiarity with motors, the philosophic Indian bullock soon gets to
regard them with supreme indifference.

CHAPTER XLVI

AGRICULTURE IN INDIA

Agricultural colleges. Indian soil exhausted; need of
chemical manures. Signs of progress among farmers. The city
sweepings. Sugar cane; hospitalities connected with it; we
are invited; our reception; the juice from the cane; its
produce in other forms. Potatoes. The Indian evening; its
rapid approach. Return of the cattle.

The Government of India are spending large sums on agricultural
research. They have a College of Agriculture on an extensive scale at
Pusa, in Bengal, and another big college near Poona has just been
completed. These handsome buildings, with their chemical laboratories,
lecture rooms, and English professors, seem at the first glance
strangely remote from the homely farmer in his native village, and the
first inclination is to suggest that these colleges will only produce
a crop of ornamental figure-heads, who will graduate in agriculture,
but who will make no practical use of the knowledge which they have
acquired.

But t