IF India wears on her brow the crown of the Himalayan snows, she adorns her toe with the jewel of the Nilgiris.

These Blue mountains, for such their name implies, are situated well down towards the toe of the Great Peninsula. They are so called for the very simple reason that, like most other mountain ranges, they look blue when viewed from a distance. But whereas many a hill range is a great deal less lovely on nearer approach, the Nilgiris borrow their beauty from no distance.

The invitation which they extend to the distant beholder is, in their case, a genuine one. He who accepts it will find in the bosoms of these beautiful hills something that he will not find in the vast ranges of the Himalayas. He will carry away recollections, not so much of vastness nor of grandeur, but of quiet homely things; and in my own case these will be the abundant song of blackbirds, the sound of running waters, and the swelling green hills with the mists that keep them green.

The Nilgiris form a plateau only of about twenty miles by thirty-five, with an average height of about 6500 feet. The highest peak scarcely touches 9000 feet. But the top of this tableland does does not possess

throughout its whole extent one square mile of flat ground. It swells into a thousand little hills, all holding up their round green heads to catch the two monsoons that come volleying in from south-west and northeast. And it is these monsoons that give these hills their verdure and their abundance of perennial streams. On the western and south-western edges of the plateau you are prevented from tumbling off it on to the plains below by a higher range, or rim, called the Kundahs. The Kundahs are what one might call a one-sided range. They present a steep glacis of grassy slopes to the plateau, but having surmounted this you find there is no other side to it. It sinks to the plains some 6000 feet below in a façade of almost sheer precipices. These peaks and precipices possess an extraordinary beauty of their own, and a grandeur proper to a much vaster type of scenery. Elsewhere the plateau breaks away to the plains in steep jungle-clad slopes and gorges, which give one the most beautiful peeps on to the misty flatnesses of Coimbatore and the rugged plateau of Mysore. The essential beauty of the Nilgiris, however, lies in the heart of the plateau, with its rolling green downs starred

with the tiny blue gentian, and unmarred with eucalyptus plantations or tea-gardens, and it is here that you can gallop for miles, once your horse has his 7000 feet wind, and with beat of hoof no more audible than that on English turf.

Such of our countrymen as live in any country but their own have a liking for trying to find, or to force, a resemblance between their own and the land of their adoption. Thus one may hear the Nilgiris likened to Dartmoor by some, to the Yorkshire moors by others, and to the hills that back the French Riviera, or to the Cotswolds with a cipher added to all the Cotswold heights. It is a pleasing but a baffling habit, for on rounding a corner your comparison may be all sent astray by the sight

of a whole mountain slope turned into a sheet of lavender by the Strobilanthes kunthianus, or by a stream-bed thickly grown with Arum lilies, or a line of tree-ferns stretching up a ravine.

For myself, I can force a certain resemblance to the rolling hills of Peeblesshire or Selkirkshire, with the Eildons, several Tintos, and Tintos, and several Tweeds. And when the mists are abroad, this resemblance sometimes forces itself on me.

But when riding far out on the downs on a typical Nilgiri summer day-to wit, one with a tearing wind and a fine driving rain-it only wants the dull roar of surf somewhere far below to carry one straight to the Sussex downs with a south westerly summer gale blowing, and the Channel lashing at the feet of white cliffs.

And yet how long did these goodly hills invite our sweltering countrymen to come up and make their better acquaintance? Perhaps it is the case with the best hills as with the best people. Both want more knowing than the second best. Europeans entered the Nilgiris very early in the seventeenth century, but found them little to their liking. The first British explorers came nearly 200 years later; but instead of bursting into raptures over such a sanatorium and such a refuge from the heat of the plains, they

found my beloved Nilgiris to be "extremely cold and unhealthful from continual covering of mists and clouds." They departed whence they came, and the hills plunged again in thought. In those days, however, British India comprised few, if any, mountain ranges over the fever altitude, and hills were looked on as the haunt of fever, not as a refuge from it. Sick men then took the sea-voyage to South Africa or Australia to get well.

But at long last the Nilgiris having proved beyond all pos

sible question, by insisting on an introduction lasting some three centuries, that they were quite the best kind of hills, admitted into their bosom one John Sullivan. We find him really letting himself go over his experiences, describing how water froze at night in his basin; how he walked by day without feeling the sun; and much more about wild strawberries, raspberries, roses, marigolds, and balsams. He apparently either lacked time or paper to include in his inventory a mention of the Nilgiri blackbird, of the running waters, and of the crimson rhododendrons, possibly because the first of the three were not in song, and the last not in blossom. From that day the vogue of the Nilgiris grew, and now, just one hundred years later, we have our Ootacamund (she who somehow just fails of being easily first amongst all Indian hill stations), and a railway thereto which eats up most of its earnings in extricating itself from the steep places it is always sliding into. And we have the Ootacamund Hunt with its button and green collar, and our Game Association laws, municipalities, roads, and tolls. Have we not also our Nilgiri bard who sometimes sings in Punch '? To save the indigenous woods the eucalyptus and wattle have been introduced, and have

much changed, for the worse, portions of the plateau. Neither tree will ever look to the manner born or appear as anything but bad patches on a fair garment. Indeed, the Nilgiris have been so civilised, opened up, and developed, that we may be pardoned a sigh sometimes and a wish that we could have these hills as they were in John Sullivan's day, when the world was younger, and when it still wondered at water freezing in its basin, when bison still roamed on the downs, and the wild goat (or Nilgiri ibex) was less scarce and inaccessible than he now is. Yet it is one of the greatest charms of these hills that, with all their civilisation, they yet preserve tolerably spacious corners of incomparable beauty and wildness.

Happy are the Nilgiris in that they have little or no history. Ever have they let the legions thunder past. Nor were the legions inclined to pierce the triple line of defence -malarial forest, river, and frowning cliffs-in order to gain a plateau which offered neither booty nor strategical position. The crumbling remains of two jungle-grown forts perched on rocky promontories are said to represent the extent of the hold which the Mysore kings had on the plateau, until Arthur Wellesley caused it to pass into the possession of John Company.

III.

He interests me because he is a man living amongst game, suffering in property from game, yet taking no interest in game. So far as I know, he possesses no instinct for the chase. He is neither shikari nor poacher, and he owns and desires to own no weapon but a grazier's staff. He is a hairy handsome fellow, profoundly impressed with his own superiority over all other men, and possessing the sublime dignity of complete inertia. He is not in the least concerned as to who he is or from what stock descended, but only with his wild-eyed buffaloes and their produce. He is a grazier pure and simple, and in any picture of the Nilgiris a Toda is sure to be represented as standing in the foreground, staff in hand, and sedulously watching his herds. But this is a misrepresentation. His normal normal posture is recumbent, eyes elosed; although I once saw a Toda more or less on end.

For his dwelling, which is like the tilt of a waggon set on the ground, possessing one tiny door and no other orifice whatever, the Toda chooses the most delightful sites. Some little green plot of turf is what he likes, in a glade, a stream running past his door, with the rolling grazing lands all round and a view of distant peaks.

These are just the places I like to pitch my tent in, and there are not too many of them, but a Toda is usually there first.

A swarm of merry children are always playing in the sun; and Mrs Toda may be seen curling her well-buttered locks round a stick which she keeps for the purpose.

All seems to be well. Yet it is difficult to conceive an arrangement less likely to ensure domestic bliss than that by which a woman wives several brothers, and is in addition permitted an officially recognised lover; nor one by which female babies are, or rather were (for the practice is now said to have ceased), placed in the entrances to the buffalopens, to be trampled to death as the beasts came out in the morning. The Nilgiri gazetteer who tells you all about the

The gazetteer continues without a pause in its stately cadences : "On rising in the morning the men salute the sun with a quaint gesture, putting the thumb to the nose in a manner similar to the English boy's token of derision." After seeing him through the routine of the day, the gazetteer, without a smile, puts the Toda to bed, and we learn that his penultimate act before dowsing his lamp is again to make a long nose at it.

Writers of gazetteers are not allowed any sort of levity in their labours; but I think the author of this one must have had a smile concealed up his sleeve somewhere.

I have not myself, owing to the language bar, much personal acquaintance with the

The Toda's religion is a mad medley of buffaloes, dairies, spirits, precipices, peaks, and leeches. The souls of good Todas, with those of a selected buffalo or two, which are killed at his funeral, are believed to leap from a certain famous peak in the Nilgiris, and pass into an underworld. Here a grazier's life is led, until by much herding of spirit beeves, the deceased's lower legs are worn away to the knee. Reincarnation then sets in, and he becomes once more a fleshand-blood Toda with complete legs.

Anthony the shikari lives in a slummy sort of suburb of Ootacamund, spelt phonetically "Candle." Amongst his ancestry he numbers an Irish soldier, who, marrying a lady of the country, begat progeny who were in colour what wags call café au lait. The next generation was more café and

The bad Toda after death suffers something lingering with leeches in it. Any one who has had a leech upon his legs will appreciate him as a first-class ingredient in any kind of hell whatever.

less lait; and the next, in which I place Anthony, was noire, but still Roman Catholic and wearing a semblance of European dress. Anthony's children, unless the R.C. priest keeps a tight hand on them, will probably stray into another fold where they wear castemarks and chew betel-nut.