eyes to a new sight and am able to tell
nothing more than what I, as a stranger, saw.
I must premise, however, that lac is the product
of a very small female insect, deposited
round the branches of certain Eastern trees;
and is manufactured for two purposes;—as
stick-lac and seed-lac it becomes a red dye;
as shell-lac it is a resin of which the best
sealing-wax is made.

Setting out from a neighbouring station,
and having only two days' leave, it was of no
use for me to flinch from the rain, which came
down as it is apt to come during the monsoon,
when it is very much the sort of rain one gets
acquainted with in the most rainy parts of
Ireland. Splashing away down the road
behind a fine Australian horse, yoked in a
buggy, passing the bungalows of the civilians
and catching a glimpse now and then of the
sacred river, which looked very dropsical—it
had been swelling for some weeks—I set out,
therefore, on my expedition. The road, by
the time I got to Dashapore, was a small
Ganges through which the Australian
tramped spattering the water up over his ears.
Hindoos who had money to earn were abroad
in the streets under umbrellas, and the west
end of the town being paved with stone, one
might, with shut eyes, dream of a rattle on
the stones of London. That was possible
with shut eyes only. Even in London, one
would scarcely meet with such a sight as the
one-ponied native gig, containing, beside the
driver, one fat and one lean native, each with
a scarlet turban and a crimson umbrella.
You might in London meet an Oriental
woman wrapped in a dirty sheet, and
carrying a platter, for the contributions of
bystanders, but you would not see on her platter
a brass cup of water, three or four gay flowers,
two or three bright coloured powders, and a
few grains of rice; or ever suppose that she
was carrying them as a morning offering to
the gods Mahadeo and Gunesh. Such a
woman I passed, who, as I came near, duly
turned her face to the wall, but made a
wonderful display of leg. You would not in
London see an armourer at work in his shop
sharpening a sword, or architecture that
reminds you much of the Arabian Nights,
gilded mosques, temples elaborately carved;
or goats, with their backs curled and their
hair staring, quietly standing under shelter
half-way up steep staircases that lead from
dwellings and project into the narrow street.
A smell as of a giant sealing his gigantic
letters with gigantic sticks of wax, informed
me when the factory was near. I drove into
the yard of it, and halting at the door of a
bungalow, accosted a gentleman whom I found
seated in the verandah, warmly attired in a
flannel jacket and jack-boots.

My friend, a member of the firm, had not
yet come to business. Would I wait? it
was asked. I would, and did. We offered
together, (I and the gentleman in flannel,) a
burnt sacrifice of tobacco, over which he
confidentially made known to me that he felt
desperately seedy, having recently recovered
from a fever. That he should have had a
fever, I thought not surprising, when I learnt
that he never went out of "the compound,"
and saw that in that enclosure there were
more weeds than were likely to be
wholesome. My friend of the firm presently
arrived, and talked mysteriously with a
bright-eyed and bright-turbaned native, who
had gold armlets gleaming faintly through
the sleeves of his fine muslin dress. We
then set forth on our survey.

The factory is made up of long single-
storied buildings, scattered about without
apparent order. We went into one of them.
It was a store-room that contained some
hundreds of thousand pounds weight of twigs
encrusted with a gummy substance. "What
have we here?" I asked; and I was told
that there I had the raw material Stick-Lac,
just as it was gathered and brought in from
the jungles of Central India, distant between
two and five hundred miles away from
Dashapore. Two porters passed us, carrying an
open sack of twigs slung by a pole between
them; my friend Asterisk selected a good
specimen out of the sack, snapped it across,
and bade me pay attention to the fracture.
Of course there was wood in the middle;
round about the wood there was a circle of
blackish-looking seeds—not really seeds, I
supposed, but they resembled them; outside
was an enclosing crust of resin. "That," said
my friend, "is animal resin, formed by the
little insects, the lac-cochineals, who produce
for us our raw material out in the jungle.
The blackish seeds that are not seeds, are
little bags of matter which has been formed
on the stomachs of the insects, and is left by
them after their death as food for their larvæ:
the outer coat of resin being designed for the
shelter also of those larvæ. We pass both
bags and resin through this factory, and get
out of them food and shelter for ourselves,
and for a good many men also, our work-
people and others". It occurred to me that
there must be some tact required in gathering
the twigs at the right season; and, having
hinted so much, I had my discernment
flattered by the information that it requires
a practised skill to gather the stick-lac at a
critical period; which is of short duration,
that is to say, after the bags have been
deposited, and before the larvæ have begun to eat
them.

"This," said my friend, "is the first stage of
manufacture". He led me to an oriental
group of women, who were grinding the
encrusted twigs in hand-mills, two women
grinding at each mill. They all talked in a
discordant chorus; and their children—their
own larvæ—were all there, crawling about
among them.

We then went to the dye-works, an inner
square, edged on all sides with a verandah.
Two sides of the square, under the verandah,