of the god upon them; and at once pledged myself to Nathu that he should find neither the god’s name nor that of his wife.  I sent one man up, and another man down, and they found no letters on the trees; but this did not alter their opinion on the point.  ‘God’, said one, ’had no doubt put his name on these trees, but they had somehow or other got rubbed off.  He would in good time renew them, that men’s eyes might be blessed with the sight of His holy name, even in the deepest forest, and on the most leafless tree.’[5] ‘But’, said Nathu, ’he might not have thought it worth while to write his name upon those trees which no travellers go to see.’  ‘Cannot you see’, said I, ’that these letters have been engraved by man?  Are they not all to be found on the trunk within reach of a man’s hand?’ ‘Of course they are’, replied he, ’because people would not be able conveniently to distinguish them if God were to write them higher up.’

Shaikh Sadi has a very pretty couplet, ’Every leaf of the foliage of a green tree is, in the eye of a wise man, a library to teach him the wisdom of his Creator.’[6] I may remark that, where an Englishman would write his own name, a Hindoo would write that of his god, his parent, or his benefactor.  This difference is traceable, of course, to the difference in their governments and institutions.  If a Hindoo built a town, he called it after his local governor; if a local governor built it, he called it after the favourite son of the Emperor.  In well regulated Hindoo families, one cannot ask a younger brother after his children in presence of the elder brother who happens to be the head of the family; it would be disrespectful for him even to speak of his children as his own in such presence—­the elder brother relieves his embarrassment by answering for him.

On the 27th[7] we reached Damoh,[8] where our friends, the Browns, were to leave us on their return to Jubbulpore.  Damoh is a pretty place.  The town contains some five or six thousand people, and has some very handsome Hindoo temples.  On a hill immediately above it is the shrine of a Muhammadan saint, which has a very picturesque appearance.

There are no manufactures at Damoh, except such as supply the wants of the immediate neighbourhood; and the town is supported by the residence of a few merchants, a few landholders, and agricultural capitalists, and the establishment of a native collector.  The people here suffer much from the guinea-worm, and consider it to arise from drinking the water of the old tank, which is now very dirty and full of weeds.  I have no doubt that it is occasioned either by drinking the water of this tank, or by wading in it:  for I have known European gentlemen get the worm in their legs from wading in similar lakes or swamps after snipes, and the servants who followed them with their ammunition experience the same effect.[9] Here, as in most other parts of India, the tanks get spoiled by the water-chestnut, ‘singhara’ (Trapa