Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. The syce springs down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a "globe-trotter" would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,--pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,--urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shaded road. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old "Domestic Bible,"--we children pronounce it "Dom-i-stick,"--how the Lord said unto Moses, "Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice." As we would see these "twenty fat bullocks" time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.
The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grown ox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks are always "bowed to the yoke," to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks' necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan, the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides.