friend, but do you know the reason why?'

'No.'

'Then I will tell you. Forty or fifty years ago, in what you call the
times of the "barkat" (blessing from above), the cavalry of Sikh
freebooters from the Panjab used to sweep over this fine plain, in
which stands the said village from which you are all descended; and
to massacre the whole population of some villages, and a certain
portion of that of every other village; and the lands of those killed
used to be waste for want of cultivators. Is not this all true?'

'Yes, quite true.'

'And the fine groves which had been planted over the plain by your
ancestors, as they separated from the great parent stock, and formed
independent villages and hamlets for themselves, were all swept away
and destroyed by the same hordes of freebooters, from whom your poor
imbecile emperors, cooped up in yonder large city of Delhi, were
utterly unable to defend you?'

'Quite true,' said the old man with a sigh. 'I remember when all this
fine plain was as thickly studded with fine groves of mango-trees as
Rohilkhand, or any other part of India.'

'You know that the land requires rest from labour, as well as men and
bullocks, and that, if you go on sowing wheat and other exhausting
crops, it will go on yielding less and less returns, and at last not
be worth the tilling?'

'Quite well.'

'Then why do you not give the land rest by leaving it longer fallow,
or by a more frequent alternation of crops relieve it?'

'Because we have now increased so much that we should not get enough
to eat were we to leave it to fallow; and unless we tilled it with
exhausting crops we should not get the means of paying our rents to
the Government.'

'The Sikh hordes in former days prevented this; they killed off a
certain portion of your families, and gave the land the rest which
you now refuse it. When you had exhausted one part, you found another
recovered by a long fallow, so that you had better returns; but now
that we neither kill you, nor suffer you to be killed by others, you
have brought all the cultivable lands into tillage; and under the old
System of cropping to exhaustion, it is not surprising that they
yield you less returns.'[8]

By this time we had a crowd of people seated around us upon the
ground, as I went on munching my parched gram, and talking to the old
patriarch.

They all laughed at the old man at the conclusion of my last speech,
and he confessed I was right.

'This is