dhobies spread their white garments to dry on the warm sand of its bed. Fishermen wade waist-deep in the stream and cast their nets with inimitable skill. The shoals of small fish look like living bits of silver as they are drawn out of the water. They are of a muddy flavour, but much sought after by the natives for curry. Gulls fly over the surface of the pools with melancholy cry. Sandpipers run over the shining mudbanks lower down, where the water is brackish and where the reeds grow, and tiny sunbirds flaunt their metallic tints in the brilliant sunshine on the banks.
There had been a 'wash-out,' as the railway people familiarly term a flood, a short time before I paid a visit to Cuddalore. The road bridge, a fine erection with many arches, bad been broken in the centre and the heavy masonry piers partly demolished. Enormous blocks of stone and brickwork were found some distance down the bed when the waters abated, showing how great had been the strength of the flood. On my way from the station I had to cross in a boat, as there had not been time to repair the bridge.
In one of these floods a passenger train on the South Indian Railway was feeling its way along the line in the hands of a careful European driver. He arrived at one of the bridges. The water, breaking all former records, was just beginning to flow over the top. As his engine passed on to it he felt a strange trembling of the structure. It was the work of a moment to reverse the engine and back off. No sooner did he regain the embankment than the bridge was carried away with a dull roar of crumbling masonry, and the river rushed on its way unimpeded by arch or pier; it was a narrow escape for the unconscious passengers.
When I visited the fort it was nothing but a group of deserted mounds, overgrown with coarse grass and those
