[Respectfully dedicated to our law-makers in India, who, by giving to the soldier-peasants of the Punjab the novel right of alienating their ancestral holdings, are fast throwing the land, and with it the balance of power, into the hands of money-grubbers; thus reducing those who stood by us in our time of trouble to the position of serfs.]
"Ai! Daughter of thy grandmother," muttered old Jaimul gently, as one of his yoke wavered, making the handle waver also. The offender was a barren buffalo doomed temporarily to the plough, in the hopes of inducing her to look more favourably on the first duty of the female sex, so she started beneath the unaccustomed goad.
"Ari! sister, fret not," muttered Jaimul again, turning from obscure abuse to palpable flattery, as being more likely to gain his object; and once more the tilted soil glided between his feet, traced straight by his steady hand. In that vast expanse of bare brown field left by or waiting for the plough, each new furrow seemed a fresh diameter of the earth-circle which lay set in the bare blue horizon--a circle centring always on Jaimul and his plough. A brown dot for the buffalo, a white dot for the ox, a brown and white dot for the old peasant with his lanky brown limbs and straight white drapery, his brown face, and long white beard. Brown, and white, and blue, with the promise of harvest sometime if the blue was kind. That was all Jaimul knew or cared. The empire beyond, hanging on the hope of harvest, lay far from his simple imaginings; and yet he, the old peasant with his steady hand of patient control, held the reins of government over how many million square miles? That is the province of the Blue Book, and Jaimul's blue book was the sky.
"Bitter blue sky with no fleck of a cloud,
Ho! brother ox! make the plough speed.
[Ai! soorin! straight, I say!]
'Tis the usurers' bellies wax fat and proud
When poor folk are in need."
The rude guttural chant following these silent, earth-deadened footsteps was the only sound breaking the stillness of the wide plain.
"Sky dappled grey like a partridge's breast,