On many of the banks bordering the roads, thatching grass, or rather
strong upright waving grass, with a beautiful feathery plume, is
planted. This is used to make the walls of the houses, and these are
then plastered outside and in with clay and cowdung. The tall hedge
of dense grass keeps what little breeze there may be away from the
traveller. The road is something like an Irish 'Boreen,' wanting only
its beauty and freshness. On a hot day the atmosphere in one of these
village roads is stifling and loaded with dust.

These houses with their grass walls and thatched roof are called
_kutcha_, as opposed to more pretentious structures of burnt brick,
with maybe a tiled sloping or flat plastered roof, which are called
_pucca. Pucca_ literally means 'ripe,' as opposed to _cutcha_, 'unripe';
but the rich Oriental tongue has adapted it to almost every kind of
secondary meaning. Thus a man who is true, upright, respected, a man
to be depended on, is called a _pucca_ man. It is a word in constant
use among Anglo-Indians. A _pucca_ road is one which is bridged and
metalled. If you make an engagement with a friend, and he wants to
impress you with its importance, he will ask you, Now is that _pucca_?'
and so on.

Other houses in the village are composed of unburnt bricks cemented
with mud, or maybe composed of mud walls and thatched roof; these,
being a compound sort of erection, are called _cutcha pucca_. In the
_cutcha_ houses live the poorer castes, the _Chumars_ or workers in
leathers, the _Moosahms, Doosadhs_, or _Gwallahs_.

The _Dornes_, or scavengers, feeders on offal, have to live apart in a
_tolah_, which might be called a small suburb, by themselves. The
_Dornes_ drag from the village any animal that happens to die. They