ber,' said the old man, 'when you
could not have got out of the road hereabouts without a good deal of
risk. I could not have ventured a hundred yards from the village
without the chance of having my clothes stripped off my back. Now the
whole face of the country is under cultivation, and the roads are
safe; formerly the governments kept no faith with their landholders
and cultivators, exacting ten rupees where they had bargained for
five, whenever they found the crops good; but, in spite of all this
"zulm"' (oppression), said the old man, 'there was then more "barkat"
(blessings from above) than now. The lands yielded more returns to
the cultivator, and he could maintain his little family better upon
five acres than he can now upon ten.'

'To what, my old friend, do you attribute this very unfavourable
change in the productive powers of your soil?'

'A man cannot, sir, venture to tell the truth at all times, and in
all places,' said he.

'You may tell it now with safety, my good old friend; I am a mere
traveller ("musafir") going to the hills in search of health, from
the valley of the Nerbudda, where the people have been suffering much
from blight, and are much perplexed in their endeavour to find a
cause.'

'Here, sir, we all attribute these evils to the dreadful System of
_perjury_, which the practices of your judicial courts have brought
among the people. You are perpetually putting the Ganges water into
the hands of the Hindoos, and the Koran into those of Muhammadans;
and all kinds of lies are every day told upon them. God Almighty can
stand this no longer; and the lands have ceased to be blessed with
that fertility which they had before this sad practice began. This,
sir, is almost the only fault we have, any of us, to find with your
government; men, by this System of perjury, are able to cheat each
other out of their rights, and bring down sterility upon the land, by
which the innocent are made to suffer for the guilty.'

On reaching our tents, I asked a respectable farmer, who came to pay
his respects to the Commissioner of the division, Mr. Fraser, what he
thought of the matter, telling him what I had heard from my old
friend on the road. 'The diminished fertility is,' said he, 'owing no
doubt to the want of those salutary fallows which the fields got
under former governments, when invasions and civil wars were things
of common occurrence, and kept at least two-thirds of the land waste;
but there is, o