morning, or late in the afternoon, the mystery will soon be revealed.  You will see a dusky, sinewy figure, not of a monkey, but of a man, ascending and descending those trees with marvellous celerity and ease, grasping the trunks with his hands and fitting his naked feet into slight notches cut in them.  The distance between the notches is so great that his knee goes up to his chin at each step, but he is as supple as he is sinewy and feels no inconvenience.  For he is a Bhundaree, or Toddy-drawer, and his forefathers have been Bhundarees since the time, I suppose, when Manu made his immortal laws.

His waistcloth is tightly girded about him, in his hand he carries a broad billhook as bright and keen as a razor, and from his caudal region depends a tail more strange than any borne by beast or reptile.  It looks like a large brown pot, constructed in the middle.  It is, in fact, a large gourd, or calabash, hanging by a hook from the climber’s waistband.  When he has reached the top of a tree, he gets among the branches and, sitting astride of one of them, proceeds to detach one of the black pots from the stout fruit stem on which it is fastened, and empty its contents into his tail.  Then, taking his billhook, he carefully pares the raw end of the stem, refastens the black pot in its place and hurries down to make the ascent of another tree, and so on until his tail is full of a foaming white liquor spotted with drowned honey bees and filling the surrounding air with a rank odour of fermentation.  This liquor is “toddy.”

If I were a Darwin I would not leave that word until I had traced the agencies which wafted it over sea and land from the shores of Hindustan to the Scottish coast, where it first took root and, quickly adapting itself to a strange environment, developed into a new and vigorous species, spread like the thistle and became a national institution.  At first it was only the Briton’s way of mouthing a common native word, “tadi” (pronounced ta-dee), which meant palm juice; but it became current in its present shape as early as 1673, when the traveller Fryer wrote of “the natives singing and roaring all night long, being drunk with toddy, the wine of the cocoe.”  About a century later Burns sang,

  The lads and lasses, blythely bent,
  To mind baith saul and body,
  Sit round the table, weel content,
  And steer about the toddy.

Between these I can find no vestigia, but imagination easily fills the gap.  I see a company of jovial Scots, met in Calcutta, or Surat, on St. Andrew’s Day.  European wines and beer are expensive, whisky not obtainable at all; but the skilful khansamah makes up a punch with toddy spirit, hot water, sugar and limes, and they are “well content.”  After many years I see the few of them who still survive foregathered again in the old country, and one proposes to have a good brew of toddy for auld lang syne.  If real toddy spirit cannot be had, what of that?