always a weaver. He cannot become a blacksmith or carpenter. He has no
choice. He must follow the hereditary trade. The peculiar system of
land-tenure in India, which secures as far as possible a bit of land
for every one, tends to perpetuate this hereditary selection of trades,
by enabling every cultivator to be so far independent of his
handicraft, thus restricting competition. There may be twenty _lohars_,
or blacksmiths, in a village, but they do not all follow their calling.
They till their lands, and are _de facto_ petty farmers. They know the
rudiments of their handicraft, but the actual blacksmith's work is done
by the hereditary smith of the village, whose son in turn will succeed
him when he dies, or if he leave no son, his fellow caste men will put
in a successor.

Nearly every villager during the rains may be found on the banks of the
stream or lake, angling in an amateur sort of way, but the fishermen
of Behar _par excellence_ are the _mull[=a]hs_; they are also called
_Gouhree, Beeu_, or _Muchooah_. In Bengal they are called _Nikaree_,
and in some parts _Baeharee_, from the Persian word for a boat. In the
same way _muchooah_ is derived from _much_, a fish, and _mullah_ means
boatman, strictly speaking, rather than fisherman. All boatmen and
fishermen belong to this caste, and their villages can be recognised at
once by the instruments of their calling lying all around.

Perched high on some bank overlooking the stream or lake, you see
innumerable festoons of nets hanging out to dry on tall bamboo poles,
or hanging like lace curtains of very coarse texture from the roofs and
eaves of the huts. Hauled up on the beach are a whole fleet of boats of
different sizes, from the small _dugout_, which will hold only one man,
to the huge _dinghy_, in which the big nets and a dozen men can be
stowed with ease. Great heaps of shells of the freshwater mussel show