Not only in the wild jungles, on the undulating plains, and among the
withered brown stubbles, does animal life abound in India; but the
rivers, lakes, and creeks teem with fish of every conceivable size,
shape, and colour. The varieties are legion. From the huge black
porpoise, tumbling through the turgid stream of the Ganges, to the
bright, sparkling, silvery shoals of delicate _chillooahs_ or
_poteeahs_, which one sees darting in and out among the rice stubbles
in every paddy field during the rains. Here a huge _bhowarree_ (pike),
or ravenous _coira_, comes to the surface with a splash; there a
_raho_, the Indian salmon, with its round sucker-like mouth, rises
slowly to the surface, sucks in a fly and disappears as slowly as it
rose; or a _pachgutchea_, a long sharp-nosed fish, darts rapidly by; a
shoal of mullet with their heads out of the water swim athwart the
stream, and far down in the cool depths of the tank or lake, a thousand
different varieties disport themselves among the mazy labyrinths of the
broad-leaved weeds.

During the middle, and about the end of the rains, is the best time for
fishing; the whole country is then a perfect network of streams. Every
rice field is a shallow lake, with countless thousands of tiny fish
darting here and there among the rice stalks. Every ditch teems with
fish, and every hollow in every field is a well stocked aquarium.

Round the edge of every lake or tank in the early morning, or when the
fierce heat of the day begins to get tempered by the approaching shades
of evening, one sees numbers of boys and men of the poorer classes,
each with a couple of rough bamboo rods stuck in the ground in front of
him, watching his primitive float with the greatest eagerness, and
whipping out at intervals some luckless fish of about three or four
ounces in weight with a tremendous haul, fit for the capture of a