When a Hindoo sneezes, any person who may be present, says, Live, and the sneezer adds, 'With you.' When he gapes, the gaper snaps his thumb and finger, and repeats the name of some god, as Ramă! Ramu! If he should neglect this, he commits a sin as great as the murder of a bramhön. When a person falls, a spectator says, 'Get up.' If he should not say this, he commits a great sin. In some houses, the The houses of the rich are built of brick, on four sides of an area; the north room is one story high, and contains the idol; on the ground floor of the two sides and the front are three porches, and over them rooms for the family. front is merely a high wall, containing a door in the centre. rooms occupied by the family, are mere air holes, through which the women may be seen peeping as through the gratings of a jail. At the times of the great festivals, an awning is thrown over the top of the court, into which the common spectators are admitted, while the bramhuns, or respectable people, sit on the two side verandas, and the women peep from the small crevices of the windows above. Allowing for the variation of men's tastes, the above is the general form of the houses of the rich. Their sitting and sleeping rooms contain neither pictures, looking-glasses, book-cases, tables, chairs, nor indeed any thing, except a wooden bedstead or two, loose mats, a few brass eating and drinking utensils, a hooka, and the dishes used for panů. Some of the rich natives in Calcutta approach nearer the English in their furniture, by keeping large pier glasses, chairs, couches, &c. but these are not a fair specimen of the inside of a house purely Hindoo. The houses of the middling ranks have the form of a court, but they are made with mud walls, bamboo roofs, and thatch. The poor have a single, damp, and wretched hut. Almost all their houshold goods consist of a few vessels for cooking, and others to hold their food; most of these are coarse earthen vessels. Their brass vessels are, a dish to hold the boiled rice, a round bason to hold water, and a small round dish or two. Some use a stone or a wooden dish to hold the rice. The middling ranks keep a box, or chest, to secure their little property against thieves. From the above description, some idea may be formed of a Bengal town, if we keep in mind, that there is scarcely any attention paid to regularity, so as to form streets, or rows of houses in a straight line. It is well for this people, that the climate does not make it necessary, that they should possess strong well-built houses: the house of a poor Hindoo has only one room; the middling ranks have two or three, one of which is for cooking; in another, the husband, wife and young children sleep; and in another, or upon the veranda, other branches of the family sleep. The Hindoos are not very delicate about their bed or sleeping room: they lie on a mat laid upon the floor, or at the door, and have only a thin piece of cloth to cover them. In taking a walk early in a morning, many Hindoos may be seen lying out of doors before their shops like so many corpses laid out for interment. One of the apartments, in the houses of some rich men, is appropriated to a very curious purpose, viz. when any members of the family are angry, they shut themselves up in this room, called krodhagaru, viz. the room of anger, or of the angry. When any individual is gone into this room, the master of the family goes, and persuades him or her to come out. If it is a woman, he asks her what she wants? She asks, perhaps, for a large fish to eat every day— (she has seen one probably in the hands of some other female of the family)—or for a palanqueen to carry her daily to the river to bathe--or for the means of performing the worship of some idol-or for beautiful garments or ornaments. The price of a moderate-sized clay hut is about thirty roopees. The labour for building a mud wall a cubit thick, one hundred cubits long, and seven cubits high, is, in the country, seven roopees; near Calcutta ten roopees. In the months of December and January, the Hindoos who live in mud houses, are busy in repairing and thatching them, as at this time straw is cheap. Those who live in brick houses are seldom willing to be at the expence of plastering them. The doors and windows are very few and small, the latter are often as small as the gun-holes of a ship. If a person meets with misfortunes in a particular house, he concludes that some bones are buried in it; sometimes under such superstitious fears he leaves his house. If bones are repeatedly found in a house, it is generally abandoned by the owner. When a sum of money, or any thing else, has been stolen from a house, and it is pretty certain that some person of the house is the thief, the Hindoos, in some plac es, rub the thumb nails of all the persons in the house, imagining that the name of the thief will become legible on the nail of the offender! The Hindoos consider it unlucky to leave their homes, and undertake a journey, in the month Poushi. They treat the following occurrences as bad omens; viz. if the lizard makes a noise, or any one sneezes, when a person is about to begin an action; if a person is called when he is about to set off on a journey; if a person on departing to any place hits his head against any thing, or sees an empty kůlusă (water-pan.) I have frequently seen a Hindoo, when about to take leave of another, prevented by the chirping of a lizard. It is a common saying, Ah! I suppose some. evil will befall me to-day, for the first person I saw this morning was such or such a miserable wretch.' The following are good omens, viz. if a person setting off on a journey sees a dead body, or a kůlusă full of water, or a jackal, on his left hand: or if he sees a cow, a deer, or a bramhun, on his right hand. These good and bad omens are to be found in the shastrus; but beside these, there are many which custom has established. Scarcely any Hindoos attach flower-gardens to their houses; a pumpkin plant is very often seen climbing the side of the house, and resting its fruit on the thatch; and, on a plot of ground adjoining the house of a poor man, it is very common to see the egg-plant, and plantains. Orchards are very common; the principal trees in which are the mango, jack, cocoa-nut, betel, custard-apple, plumb trees, &c. A clump or two of bamboos is very common in these orchards. To prevent a tree from continuing unfruitful, which they suppose has been injured by the evil machinations of some enemy, the Hindoos sometimes tie a string round the trunk of this tree, with a kouree, or the bone of a cow, attached to it. To drive destructive animals from a field, or a plot of cucumbers, or egg-plants, &c. the Hindoos fix on a bamboo a pot covered with soot, with some white lines drawn on it. Beside the want of gardens, the Hindoos do not keep fowls, nor any domestic animal, except a cat. The domestic birds of the country are, the water-wagtail, the mina, sparrow, crow, swallow, &c. The jackals make a horrid yell around the houses at night, and I have heard of instances of young children being carried away by them in the night, and devoured. Mad jackals do great mischief. "A man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife," is a maxim which is quite contrary to those manners of the Hindoos that are most esteemed. Marriage seldom at first separates children and parents; and a grand-father, with his children and grand-children, in a direct line, amounting to nearly fifty persons, may sometimes be found in one family.* As long as a father lives, he is the master of the house; but after his death, the elder brother is honoured almost as a - parent; if incapable of taking charge of the family, a younger brother is invested with the management. Such a family has all things in common; but if one of the brothers earns much by his labour, and the rest little or nothing, a quarrel commonly ensues, and they separate. Very few large families live together long, where they wholly depend on trade, or on several sons employed in service. Those who have landed property live in greater quietness. The debts of a father fall, in the first place, upon the eldest son, and in some cases on the younger sons, even though the father should have left no property. The work of a house-wifet is nearly as follows; after rising in the morning, in industrious families, she lights the lamp, and spins cotton for family garments; she next feeds the children with sweetmeats, or some parched rice, or milk; after this she mixes cow-dung with water, and sprinkles it over the house floor, to purify it. She then sweeps the house and yard, and, mixing cow-dung,‡ earth, and water together, smears the floor of the house, the bottom of the walls, and the veranda. After this, she eats a little cold boiled rice, and then cleans the brass and stone vessels with straw, ashes, and water. Her next work is to bruise the rice and other things in the pedal (dhénkee), or to boil the rice, in order to cleanse it from the husk. At ten or eleven o'clock, she takes a towel, and goes to bathe, accompanied by a few neighbours; some women, during bathing, make an image of the lingu, and worship it * Jŭgŭnnat'hŭ-Türkkŭ-Pŭnchanŭnů, who lived to be about 117 years of age, and was well known as the most learned man of his time, had a family of seventy or eighty individuals, among whom were his sons and daughters, grandsons, great-grandsons, and a great-great-grandson. In this family, for many years, when, at a wedding or on any other occasion, the ceremony called the shraddhŭ was to be performed, as no ancestors had deceased, they called the old folks, and presented their offerings to them. + The Hindoos keep very few female servants. The whole front of a Hindoo hut, not unfrequently, is covered with cakes of cow-dung, placed there to dry. S with the same forms as are used by the men; others merely bathe, and after repeating a few formulas, bowing to the water, the sun, &c. which occupy about fifteen minutes, return home; but if the worship of the lingu is performed, it employs nearly an hour. At the time of bathing, the women rub their ornaments with sand, clean their bodies with the refuse of oil, and their hair with the mud of the river, or pool. On her return, the female stands in the sun, and dries her hair; changes her wet clothes for dry ones; washes her feet on going into the house ;* and then applies herself to cooking. She first prepares the roots, greens, and fruits; then bruises the spices, &c. by rolling a stone over them on another stone; and then prepares the fish or vegetables which are to be eaten with the rice, which she afterwards boils. The Hindoo fireplaces are made of clay, and built in the yard, or cook-room. They also use a moveable fire-place made of clay, which is round like a kettle, and has a hole in one side to admit the wood. Those who are very poor, eat with rice only herbs gathered in some field; the middling ranks eat split pease, greens, fish, &c. The rich add a number of other things, as boiled fish, acids, pungent spices, &c. ; they also fry, in clarified butter, plantains, the fruit of the egg-plant, cocoa-nuts, pumpkins, cucumbers, &c. After the things are thus prepared, the woman (if a bramhunee) calls a son who has been invested with the poita, to present a dish of each kind of food to the family image (mostly the shaligrami); and who, in presenting them, repeats their names, and adds, ' O god! I present to thee this food: eat.' The food remains before the image about five minutes, when it is carried into another room, where all the male part of the family sit down to eat; but before they begin, each of those invested with the poita takes water into the palm of the right hand, repeats the name of his guardian deity, and pours it out as a libation; and then taking up more water, and, repeating the same words, drinks it; after which, placing his thumb in five different ways on the fingers of his right hand, he repeats certain forms, and, lifting up a few grains of rice, presents them to the primary elements.† At the close of dinner, * A woman, after bathing, will not touch any thing till she has put some substance into her mouth : the reason of this custom, which is universal, is unknown; the general answer is, the neglect of it would bring down misfortunes on the family. + Earth, water, fire, air, and vacuum. |