( 50 THE PALLERS
want and misery, liovv much more gratefully would they appreciate the lot that Providence has assigned to them!
As for myself, for the first ten or twelve years that 1 was in India, I lived in such abject poverty that I had hardly sufficient means to procure the bare necessaries of
life; but even then I was as happy and contented as I am now that I am better off. Besides the consolations which my religion gave me under these trying circumstances, my reason found me others in the reflection that nineteentwentieths of the people among whom I was living were bearing far greater trials of all kinds than any that I was called on to endure.
Besides the Pariahs, who are to be found all over the Peninsula, there are in certain provinces other clashes composed of individuals who equal and even surpass them in depravity of mind and customs, and in the contempt in which they are held. Such, for instance, is the caste of Palters, who are only found in Madura and in the neighbourhood of Cape Comorin. The Pallers consider themselves superior to the Pariahs, inasmuch as they do not eat the flesh of the cow; but the Pariahs look on them as altogether their inferiors, because they are the scum of the Left-hand faction, whilst they themselves are the
mainstay of the Right-hand.
These two classes of degraded beings can never agree, and wherever they are found in fairly equal numbers, the disputes and quarrels amongst them are interminable.
They lead the same sort of life, enjoy an equal share of public opprobrium, and both are obliged to live far apart
from all other classes of the inhabitants.
Amongst the forests on the Malabar coast there lives
a tribe which, incredible as it may seem, surpasses the two of which I have just spoken in degradation and squalid misery. They are called Puliahs, and are looked upon as below the level of the beasts which share this wild country with them. They are not even allowed to build themselves huts to protect themselves from the inclemencies of
the weather. A sort of lean-to, supported by four bamboo poles and open at the sides, serves as a shelter for some of them, and keeps off the rain, though it does not screen them from the wind. Most of them, however, make for