The jungle is studded with large peepul-trees, which are all shorn of their small branches and leaves.

The landholders and cultivators told me that they were taken off by the cowherds who grazed their buffaloes, bullocks, and cows in these jungles; that they formed their chief and, in the cold season, their best food, as the leaves of the peepul-tree were supposed to give warmth to the stomach, and to increase the quantity of the milk; that the cowherds were required to pay nothing for the privilege of grazing their cattle in these jungles, by the person to whom the lands belonged, because they enriched the soil with their manure, and all held small portions of land under tillage, for which they paid rent; that they had the free use of the peepul-trees in the jungles, but were not permitted to touch those on the cultivated lands and in villages.
White ants are so numerous in the argillaceous muteear soil, in which their food abounds, that it is really dangerous to travel on an elephant, or _swiftly_ on horseback, over a new road cut or enlarged through any portion of it that has remained long untilled.

The two fore legs of my elephant went down yesterday morning into a deep pit made by them, but concealed by the new road, which has been made over it for the occasion of my visit near Shahabad, and it was with some difficulty that he extricated them.

We have had several accidents of the same kind since we came out.

In cutting a new road they cut through large ant-hills, and leave no trace of the edifices or the gulf below them, which the little insects have made in gathering their food and raising their lofty habitation.