one's eye thus over the wide cotton-fields--for one associates cotton
with the New--and find them cultivated by these bare-legged and
breech-clouted peasants of the Douab, with ploughs which consisted
substantially of a crooked stick shod with iron at the end, and with
other such farming-implements out of the time that one thinks of
as forty centuries back. Yet in spite of this primitive rudeness
of culture, and of an aridity of soil necessitating troublesome
irrigation, these plains have for a prodigious period of time
supported a teeming population; and I could not help crying out to
Bhima Gandharva that if we had a few millions of these gentle and
patient peasants among the cotton-fields of the United States, the
South would quickly become a Garden of Delight and the planters could
build Jammah Masjids with rupees for marble.

[Illustration: PEASANTS OF THE DOUAB.]

The conservatism which has preserved for so long a time the ancient
rude methods of industry begins to grow on one as one passes between
these villages of people who seem to be living as if they were
perfectly sure that God never intended them to live any other way.

"It is not long," said my friend, "since a British officer of
engineers, on some expedition or other, was encamped for the night
at no great distance from here. His tent had been pitched near one of
those Persian water-wheels such as you have seen, which, although of
great antiquity, are perhaps as ingeniously adapted to the purpose of
lifting water as any machine ever invented. The creaking of the wheel
annoyed him very much, and after a restless night, owing to that
cause, he rose and went out of his tent and inquired of the proprietor
of the wheel (a native) why in the name of Heaven he never greased it.