466 ORISSA in November 1866. During the same fourteen months, the sum of £1358 was also expended in works under the supervision of the District officers. The general condition of the country from June to September may be pictured from the following paragraphs, quoted in extenso from the Report of the Famine Commissioners (vol. i. pp. 93, 94): In June, all Orissa was plunged in one universal famine of extreme severity. Although there never were such crowds of starving people and such mortality in the town of Cuttack as in Balasor and Bhadrakh, the state of Cuttack District, in which famine had been so recently discovered, was already as bad as possible. Mr. Kirkwood says that in June, at Táldandá, the distress could not be exaggerated; it was impossible to keep any sort of order among the famishing crowd, and for miles round you heard their yell for food." The relief afforded by importation was as yet extremely small; in fact, except in the town of Balasor, hardly appreciable. In Balasor town several thousand persons were fed throughout the month ; but at Bhadrakh, and in the interior of the District, the unrelieved distress was very great. In Purí, there having been no importation by sen, the relief afforded was very small. There was not, at this time, the same visible rush of starving masses in Purí as in the other Districts,-a fact due, no doubt, in part to the inability of the Collector to offer food, and n part attributed to the greater exhaustion of the people and the greater mortality which had already occurred. The only redeeming circumstance was that the rains had commenced very favourably; the agricultural classes (who set apart the seed-grain as something sacred, and keep it in a different shape from that intended for food) had still seed to sow most of their fields; and for those who could hope to live till harvest, there was a prospect of relief in the distant future. "The mortality may be said to have reached its culminating point at the beginning of the second week of August, during tlic heavy rains which preceded, and caused, the disastrous floods of this same year. The people were then in the lowest stage of exhaustion; the emaciated crowds collected at the feeding stations had no sufficient shelter, and the cold and wet seems to have killed them in fearful numbers. The defect of shelter was remcdied, but the people throughout evinced great dislike to occupy the sheds erected for them. In August, the mountain strcams which intersect Orissa rose to an almost unprecedented height; the embankments were topped and breached in all directions, and the whole of the low-lying country was flooded by an inundation which lasted for an unusual time, and which caused the terrible aggravation of the distress. Mr. Kirkwood thus reported to the Collector :-“The houseless poor looked in vain for shelter from rain that penetrated every
