So let us melt and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
A VALEDICTION.

It was punishing work, even though he travelled by night and camped
by day; but within the limits of his vision there was no man whom
Scott could call master. He was as free as Jimmy Hawkins--freer, in
fact, for the Government held the Head of the Famine tied neatly to a
telegraph-wire, and if Jimmy had ever regarded telegrams seriously,
the death-rate of that famine would have been much higher than it
was.

At the end of a few days' crawling Scott learned something of the
size of the India which he served; and it astonished him. His carts,
as you know, were loaded with wheat, millet, and barley, good
food-grains needing only a little grinding. But the people to whom he
brought the life-giving stuffs were rice eaters. They knew how to
hull rice in their mortars, but they knew nothing of the heavy stone
querns of the North, and less of the material that the white man
convoyed so laboriously. They clamoured for rice--unhusked paddy,
such as they were accustomed to--and, when they found that there was
none, broke away weeping from the sides of the cart. What was the use
of these strange hard grains that choked their throats? They would
die. And then and there were many of them kept their word. Others
took their allowance, and bartered enough millet to feed a man
through a week for a few handfuls of rotten rice saved by some less
unfortunate. A few put their shares into the rice-mortars, pounded