Beast and Man in India Part 6

Where we should say that a man lives in clover, they say, "He has five fingers in the ghi." Usually by frugal people one or two fingers only are put into the pot. Another saying is: "A straight finger extracts no ghi,"

_i.e._ one must go judiciously (or crookedly) to work in order to get anything worth having. A precarious livelihood is expressed by, "Sometimes a handful of ghi and sometimes a mouthful of lentils." The French gibe at England,--"a hundred religions and only one sauce,"--(melted b.u.t.ter) may be warrantable, but it is mere everyday fact in India, where the food would be but sorry and innutritious fare without the mercy of ghi. The prosperity of a man is often gauged by his indulgence in ghi, which has an infallible effect on the figure. Vegetarian Hindus have a natural tendency to eat too much, and a gaunt cultivator will point to a fat and prosperous tradesman as a ghi-fed bullock. It will be observed that the hand is always spoken of, and in fact the hand is always used. A Sikh peasant making you welcome, will bring a bowl of milk, strongly impregnated with the wood smoke with which milk vessels are purified, and, after he has put in some sugar, will stir it with his fingers in the most friendly way. One of the many compromises with the ordinances of caste, that make things pure or impure, is their relaxation with reference to sweetmeats compounded of sugar and ghi, an important part of the food of the people. The confectioner is a man of no very exalted caste, but all may eat from his hand. He abuses this privilege of reputed purity, and is in fact more dirty in his person and more thoroughly saturated with the grease he handles than there is any occasion for. One agent in the vast battery of elements that produces the characteristic Indian odour of Indian cities and crowds is the use of ghi as hair oil and as a lubricant for the skin after bathing. In the south oil is much used for these purposes, but in most regions ghi is popular, nor is it unwholesome except to the alien nose.

Wealth may be no longer expressed in terms of the cow, but the possession of cows is accepted as a sign of being well-to-do. So the freedom from care which is one of the alleviations of poverty, is stated in, "He sleeps well who has neither cow nor calf." Where we should say "The early bird catches the worm," the Indian rustic says "Who sleeps late gets the bull-calf, he who rises early the cow-calf,"--which is more valuable. The saying indicates the division of property among members of a family living together. An early rising brother or cousin could change his bull for the cow-calf of his lazy relative who ought to have been on the spot to look after it, or a knavish neighbour might surrept.i.tiously swap the new births.

Bewitched cattle are not peculiar to benighted India, but may be heard of even in Britain of the Board school. There is a more profound conviction in Eastern superst.i.tions, further intensified by the ever-present notion that once the beast was man. A current story tells how a poor man borrowed a sum of money far beyond his power to repay. Lying anxiously awake at night among his oxen, he heard one say that the master would surely serve the money-lender as an ox in the future life. So he rose and questioned that wise bullock, who said: "Return the money to the usurer, and, since you are in need, take me to the king and back me for that sum to fight his champion elephant." This was done; the amazed king accepted the wager of his fighting elephant against a lean ox, and the beasts were paraded in the arena. The elephant ignominiously fled from the bullock, who snorted and pawed the ground in meagre majesty. So the king paid the wager and the elephant confessed that in a previous existence he had borrowed a large sum and still owed it to the man who was now that starveling bullock. Our English notions on this subject are mainly those of Mrs. Barbauld's tiny but charming cla.s.sic, _The transmigrations of Indur_, but to the native mind the wandering soul has a more complex and disquieting fate than is there indicated. The old birth stories of Buddhism, also, are milder and less stern in retributive vengeance than many notions actually current.

Dire strokes of bereavement or misfortune, and grievous diseases, such as leprosy, inflict a keener anguish, a more hopeless sorrow, when regarded as punishments for sin committed in some past life.

These ideas are not distinctively Hindu in their main issue, which is the vulgar demon belief that sends the souls of those who have died by violence or in child-birth, or who in life showed strong character, to plague or protect the living. In Tibet, under the name of Buddha, there now seems to be no other religion; American Indians know it as well as the Indo-Chinese, and though educated Hindus hint that it is a degradation of Hinduism, it seems to have preceded Hinduism and to have flourished alongside it. At the present moment demonolatry is the real, everyday faith of thousands who profess either Hinduism or Muhammadanism for an official, Sunday creed.

Snake demons, animated by the souls of "kenned folk" deceased, are supposed to be charged with the protection of cattle and are regularly wors.h.i.+pped. A cultivator's wife, seeing a snake, will say in effect "O dear! I have forgotten his dues," and will make offerings of milk and curds with quaint formalities. Yet all the eldritch mischiefs attributed to fays and goblins in our old English literature are wrought on cattle by witch and wizard.

The evil eye is potent to cripple and kill, nor are Muhammadans a whit more free from fear than Hindus. So you may see an old shoe,--emblem of humiliation,--hung like an amulet round the neck of a Muhammadan's buffalo, or a black thread round that of his cow. Hindus tie amulets and charms round the necks of their cows, or secretly, with invocations, twist strands of human hair round the roots of the horns or on the fetlock and with spells and charms innumerable try to ward off evil. But though devoutly believed in, the people are not readily communicative about these things.

Half their force lies in their secrecy. The charm would no longer act if it were blabbed about. So it were presumption to speak too confidently of the details of this phase of Oriental thought, which, like water as described by modern physical science, flows in hidden and undivulged courses as well as in the sun-lighted rivers of the surface. It is also unwise to angrily denounce these notions as some clever and positive young Britons are p.r.o.ne to do. For, after all, they were current but yesterday, and indeed are still alive, among very excellent people in these islands.

When cattle are sick or disabled they are doctored and treated with great, but unintentional barbarity. A European should hesitate before condemning a native practice for its unlikeness to anything within his knowledge, for it has the experience of centuries for a warrant. Yet, while admitting the Indian discovery and use of many valuable medicines, it is not too much to say broadly that native notions on sanitation and the treatment of disease in men and animals amount in practice to a conspiracy against the public health. The cruelty they involve is only an incident. When spells and charms have failed, the branding iron and knife are freely used. Sometimes you see a broad line burnt and cut right round the body of an old ox as a Plimsoll load line is drawn round the hull of a s.h.i.+p, while each deeply sunken eye has a cruel circle seared round its...o...b..t. Curious patterns of gridirons, Solomon stars, and mystic marks of Siva are scored deeply over strained shoulders and muscles whose only disease is the stiffness of age or the weakness of imperfect feeding. Great importance is attached to the form of the brand, which is often a signature of a G.o.d. A flower pattern is good for one disease, a palm for another. The ears are sometimes slit as a remedy for colic. Then there is a grotesque nastiness of invention in the medicinal messes the poor beasts are made to swallow, and a perverse ingenuity in running counter to the plain course of nature. I remember being told that our cow which had recently calved was suddenly taken sick and like to die. The cowman had decided that she was suffering from an unusual form of deadly fever. So in the fierce hot weather he had shut her up in a close byre, stuffed the window with rags and straw, carefully closed the door, and happed her in thick clothing. She was very like to die indeed, but recovered promptly on being rescued from heat and suffocation.

An amazing ignorance of elementary facts is often shown. A case recently occurred in which a cultivator, familiar with cattle, called in a countryside quack to his sick cow. The pract.i.tioner opened the animal's mouth and, drawing forth the tongue, showed the rough papillae at its root.

"This is what is the matter with her,--these rough things must be cut off."

And the poor creature's tongue was actually shaved! It would be easy to fill many pages with similar horrors, but I would rather be read than cast aside in disgust, and gladly turn to such hopeful signs as may be discerned.

The veterinary schools and colleges with animal infirmaries attached, established by Government in the great cities, are doing something towards the spread of sounder notions. Improvement must be slow, but it is well on its way. The West can offer no more precious gift to the East than a knowledge of the nature and treatment of disease in men and animals. Yet hope were not, if not dashed by doubt, and no one who knows India can afford to be over-confident. For the worst enemies of medical science are not there, as in Europe, the enthusiast and the quack who pin their loud faith on one imperfectly apprehended idea or one nostrum, but the apathy of the people and their rooted habit of negligence.

It is natural that many things should be likened to so necessary and sacred a creature as the cow, but some of the similes appear far-fetched to the Western mind. Thus a house with a narrow frontage and wide behind,--an auspicious arrangement,--is spoken of as cow-mouthed. In the Hindu ear the mere word is grateful, for the Ganges itself is said to issue from a "cow's mouth" up in the hills, and there are many sacred wells and stream pools known as cows' mouths. An upper window is a cow's eye, like the French _il de buf_, an oval loaf of bread like one of the forms of Vienna bread in London shops, is known as ox-eye, and things which taper are "cow-tail fas.h.i.+on." One of the words in use for evening means, when hunted down, "cows' dust," and indicates the return of the cattle to the village.

Cow-like means docile and meek, "girls and cows are easily disposed of,"

says an over-confident proverb which Western mothers can scarcely adopt, and the varying tempers of cows find ant.i.types in women. "Muttra girls and Gokul cows won't stir if they can help it," says rustic Hindustan.

Everywhere, a big stout woman is spoken of as "that buffalo," for all round the world there is a lumbering type of generally admirable womanhood to whom the word is exquisitely suited. One of the drawbacks of polite society is that the use of picturesque and truth-telling similes of this kind is discouraged. We all know excellent ladies who remind us of camels, devoted mothers who suggest cows, charming girls who are as fawns or gazelles, sharp grandames who are like hawks, eagles, or parrots, placid women who bleat timidly over wool-work, fussy, movement-promoting ladies who cluck like hens and throw up their eyes at meetings like fowls when they drink; just as we know men who are pigs, a.s.ses, foxes, goats, dogs, etc.--but we may not often say so. The Oriental rustic is under no such restraint, so pepper is added to the natural salt of his talk.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AT SUNSET]

_Between the waving tufts of jungle gra.s.s, Up from the river as the twilight falls, Across the dust-beclouded plain they pa.s.s On, to the village walls._

_Great is the sword and mighty is the pen, But greater far the labouring ploughman's blade, For on its oxen and its husbandmen An Empire's strength is laid._

As to the actual treatment of the cow, although some strange and indescribable forms of cruelty are practised by milkmen in large towns with intent to increase the supply of milk, and the animals are often kept in a filthy state; the beast fares on the whole as well as the means of her owners will allow. When, as often happens, a poor family owns one cow, it takes a high place in all the concerns of the household, and is even more cherished than the Irish cottager's pig. The cow-calf too is often petted and made much of. "Six handfuls to the cow-calf and one to the poor labouring ox" is a Kashmiri cry against injustice quoted in the collection of the Rev. J. H. Knowles. But male calves have a hard life and suffer terribly from imperfect nutrition. It is a deed of some temerity to find fault with practices based on centuries of usage and experience, but the treatment of the labourers of the land is a custom of cruelty. Indian cows, owing to the slack-handed management congenial to the people, are difficult milkers, and need at their flank a living calf or a straw-stuffed calf-skin (the latter is not unknown in Europe) before they will let down their milk.

The living calf is preferred, and Tantalus himself was not more tormented by baffled longing than are these poor wretches, hungrily watching the stream they may not taste. It is not always profitable to rear a male calf, so the practice, in spite of a theory which allots him a fair share, seems to be to three-quarters starve him on the chance of his surviving to be weaned. Then, in due course, he becomes an ox--the chief pillar of the Indian Empire.

And in no merely rhetorical sense, for the stress of agriculture, the more urgent strain of trade, and the movement of a vast and restless people, are on his strong shoulders. The cultivator is the backbone of the country, and depends on the ox for working the land, while the bullock cart in a great variety of forms is the main factor in Indian traffic. Hence, one of the most pleasant and vivid sensations of the returned Anglo-Indian is the sight of the superb draught horses of Britain, perhaps the most striking impersonations of the dignity of labour that the world can show. Necessity is a hard task-master for the man, but it is on his beast that the worst strokes fall. Loads have to be carried, and even if the carter were so minded, he cannot always contrive that they shall be proportioned to the strength of his animals. A load that travels easily over the hard roads of a town becomes impossible along the deep-mired village tracks. And when the overloaded wain is stuck fast there is dire trouble for the cattle. Even a father chastising his child sometimes forgets how hard he is striking, but in their excitement carters never think of the live sentient animal under their blows. The cattle are but a machine whose motor is the stick. Then, a poor man cannot afford to lay his animals up in idleness when their necks are galled or they go lame. They wince from the yoke at first, but seem to forget it as they grow warm. So does the carter, who is a marvel of apathy and indifference, especially since he is often a hireling. Weak and tired oxen can be made to work better with a free use of whip, stick, or goad, and in judicious and merciful hands such incentives are useful. But there is no precept to protect the ox from abuse of them, save perhaps that enunciated by a Bombay Police Magistrate in deciding a case of cruelty.

"There are," said this authority, "fair goads and there are severe goads.

The only question is whether in this particular case the goad is a fair one or not." The weapon in court was a sharpened nail three-quarters of an inch long at the end of a stick. "In my opinion," the Magistrate went on, "this is longer and sharper than it ought to have been. A goad of half its length would have done quite as well." So the accused was warned and discharged.

But the real question before the Magistrate was whether the carter had used his goad too freely. For needless pain can be inflicted with even three-eighths of an inch of sharpened iron at the end of a heavy male bamboo, if used often enough, and it is certainly sufficient to drive into any of G.o.d's creatures. Carters who know their business thoroughly, and are to be trusted with whips and goads three-eighths of an inch long, are everywhere scarce, and most of all in India. But the whip and the goad are not the only means of stimulation at the carter's disposal. He sits low so that he can kick freely, and he kicks hard. And when other means fail he seizes the tails of his team and twists them so that the last four or five vertebrae grind on each other. Immense numbers of Indian oxen, probably the greater part, have their tails permanently dislocated by this practice, and bob-tailed bullocks are often seen who have entirely lost the lower joints of the member, including the necessary fly-whisk with which it was originally furnished. Bullocks are probably less sensitive to pain than human creatures, but their pitiful efforts to keep their tails out of the way, and the prompt effect the brutal trick has upon their pace show that they also can feel.

"Tail-twisting" has found its way into Anglo-Indian slang. Officers of the Transport and Commissariat departments are spoken of as tail-twisters, and there are even members of Her Majesty's Civil Service who are said to need tail-twisting to keep them up to their work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLOUGHING]

Yet, while one cannot but grieve for the ox, it is obvious to every fair mind that there must be something to say for the man. He is no more brutal of himself than the rest of mankind of his rank. Generally a thoughtless lout, insensible by habit, he is not always wilfully cruel. The truth is, the bullock, without good training, is not an easy beast to drive. Only by practical experiment can this truth be fully learned, and before wholly condemning the driver it is a wholesome experience to take his place for an hour. Well-trained cattle may be driven even by an amateur, but nine-tenths of Indian teams would scarcely pay him the compliment of stirring unless he resorted to tail-twisting and beating. The strength of the ox is magnificent, and he can plod along steadily with good driving, but he has none of the zeal which animates the horse. The latter may be, as some say, a born fool, but when fairly taught to pull he gives his mind to it and, if of a good sort, goes up into his collar at half a word. The bullock, a cogitative ruminant, seems to be thinking of something else all the time, and has to be perpetually stirred out of his normal indifference.

That the main need of the ox is more intelligent training and teaching is shown by the skill which some men attain in bullock steering. A click, a tock, and a hand laid persuasively on the rump is enough for these rare artists, who are as clever in their way as some London drivers. The average cartman has not sense, patience, or skill enough to train his team, and relies on the sudden pain of whiplash, twisted tail, or goad. But to put it plainly, in so far as the well-being of the animal is concerned, it is as bad to be a duffer as a brute. Very many Indian carters are both.

A cultivator, on the other hand, ploughing or harrowing, will often work his cattle for hours together without a blow. His hand will be frequently raised to the level of his brow as if in act to strike, and he is continually talking, coaxing, cursing, or expostulating in very broad language, but he is not very often cruel. He is apt to make pets of one or two of his animals and to cherish a spite against some poor beast, who serves as "whipping boy" for the faults of the rest and as an outlet for injurious language. Yet, though his cattle are his own, he habitually overloads the carts they draw, and in moments of excitement he hammers them unmercifully.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN TIME OF DROUGHT]

BESIDE THE IDLE PLOUGH

THE STARVELING OXEN STAND

AND DEATH WILL GATHER NOW

A HARVEST FROM THE LAND.

Rudyard Kipling.

The close a.s.sociation of the ploughman with his cattle, the slow steady tramp at their heels over the field and over again in infinite turns, has given a bovine quality to the minds of those who follow the plough all round the world. Perhaps the Irish potato-digging cottier, the English market gardener, the French vine-dresser and spade cultivators generally, are smarter and more alert. The lagging, measured step may compel the mind to its cadence, and the anodyne of monotony may soothe and still the temper. However this may be, it is certain that the Indian cultivator is very like his ox. He is patient, and bears all that drought, flood, storm, and murrain can do with the same equanimity with which the ox bears blows.

When the oxen chew the cud and their masters take their nooning, the jaws of man and beast move in exactly the same manner. The succulent food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.

But the Indian peasant's dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise. And, as the ox drinks once for all, so the peasant, when he has eaten, drinks; a long draught, poured straight into the depths of him, as one who fills a cistern. Like the peasant, too, the ox is indifferent and devoid of curiosity. The horse is always ready with an apprehensive ear; eager, for all his shallow wit, to know what is going on, but the ox keeps on never minding. So does the peasant. It is not easy to convey a due sense of the serene indifference of the cultivator (and of most Indians) to the mind of readers in England where there are hundreds of fussy societies for minding other people's business. The Oriental would be just as puzzled to understand the English craze for meddling, but he may one day undergo a rueful enlightenment. A current saying shows the queer turns this indifference takes. "The field wasn't yours, the cow wasn't yours,--why did you drive it away?" This is profoundly immoral, of course. A cow is loose in a field of green corn, a philanthropic person comes by and does justice, but the peasant, who also has a cornfield liable to straying cows, resents it and wants to know why the fussy person need interfere! That the trespa.s.ser was a cow and not a donkey has something to do with it, but there is more than respect for the cow in the saying.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN A GOOD SEASON]

AND THE PLOUGHMAN SETTLED THE SHARE

MORE DEEP IN THE SUN-DRIED CLOD:

THE WHEAT AND THE CATTLE ARE ALL MY CARE

AND THE REST IS THE WILL OF G.o.d

Rudyard Kipling.

In a large and historic sense the indifference of the Indian countryman to the wars of Kings and Powers overhead may seem less wonderful to those who have an intimate knowledge of the conduct of European peasantry during continental campaigns than to us who consider Indian history mainly. But while ploughing in one field he has scarcely raised his head to watch a battle in the next. So it has been seen when three great elephants, harnessed to 40-lb. guns of position, refused to risk their precious trunks within the zone of fire, that twenty yoke of oxen tugged the field-piece among the bursting sh.e.l.ls and whizzing shot as impa.s.sively as if they were going afield. There is more in this than mere stupidity. The Mogul, the Afghan, the Pindari, the Briton, and the mutinous Sepoy, with others, have swept to and fro as the dust-storm sweeps the land, but the corn must be grown and the folk and cattle must be fed, and the cultivator waits with inflexible patience till the will of heaven be accomplished and he may turn again to the toil to which he is appointed. A toil, too, in which he feels as much pride as any other of the labouring sons of Adam can boast. This is finely put in a country saying of the Punjab Jat, a farmer who, take him for all in all, is perhaps the n.o.blest Roman of them all, "The Jat stood on his heap of corn and cried to the King's elephant drivers--Will you sell those little donkeys?"

Oxen are careful of their rights and go in due order to the long manger trough of adobe. If one takes the wrong place he is promptly set right by a horn thrust. Here the cultivator surpa.s.ses his model, for he loves litigation and enjoys nothing so much as a quarrel.

Quarrels, by the way, between different families and within the family circle, in which the women take a noisy part, are often, I firmly believe, deliberately raised as a variety on the deadly monotony of life. In English low life the virago who stands with arms akimbo and harangues the alley,--"flytes" is the Scotch term,--often says she couldn't rest till she had given forth a piece of her mind, and is notably better after a row.

Indian households prepare and conduct a quarrel with more artistic skill, use a more copious and pungent vocabulary, range over a wider field of vituperation, and are less liable to lapse into that personal violence which is the death of true art. Straying calves and goats serve the men as causes of war, and children inflame the women. "Why can't you let my child alone?" is no uncommon war-cry in the slums of Britain, and when emotion is a necessity of your nature, it serves well enough; for a fire may be fed with many things. The man's share when women go on the war-path in India, as elsewhere, is often to stand aside, see fair, and hold the baby. So he pretends to be shocked and in various phrase remarks "When a widow (or a light lady), a wife, or a bull buffalo lose their tempers, who knows what may happen!" The wide currency of this saying proves its aptness to a social situation.

He also says "a drum, a boor, a low-caste man, cattle, and women are all the better for a beating." Our half-forgotten saw of like brutality includes the woman with the dog and the walnut tree. A worse cla.s.s of sayings refers to the sordid nature of Hindu marriages: "You buy a wife and you buy oxen;" "Wives and oxen are to be had for money," and so forth. It would be idle to pretend to make out a good case for this phase of native life and society. But without much special pleading or any affectation of philosophic breadth of view, it may fairly be said that both men and women are intrinsically better than their talk, their creeds, or their social arrangements would lead one to think. Notwithstanding the marriage abuses justly denounced by reformers, there are thousands of happy households, ruled, as domestic interiors should be, by women, who in spite of superst.i.tion and a life whose every duty is a sort of ordered ritual, are virtually as sensible, bright, and good as those of Europe, and very certainly as tender and affectionate. Like most women everywhere, they realise and express the pathos of their lot, but they would strongly resent being told by outsiders that they are downtrodden, unhappy, and degraded.

The men, to whom home and family are sacred matters withdrawn from all possibility of intrusion, would resent it still more. This much is certain, that no "movement" or agitation will avail to stir them from their traditional groove. Like all the rest of the world, they are subject to change, but a change in their notions and practice where women are concerned must be the slow work of education. Reforms are supposed to be promoted in the West by a.s.sociations that career through society as a troop of wild a.s.ses sweeps over the desert, but the movement is not yet foaled that shall stir the Hindu to a faster pace than he is minded to take.

In their silence Indian cattle offer an example which the cultivator does not follow. Students in our colleges read Gray's Ode, wherein the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and say to the Professor, "Sir, what is lowing?" Neither ox nor cow lows in India. Their grunting note is seldom heard and does not carry. An English cow fills the narrow green field s.p.a.ces with her fine voice as easily as a singer fills a concert room, but the Indian herd, returning to the village, drifts across the wide gray plain silent as the dust-cloud that accompanies them. The herdsman is a vocalist. Not one European in a hundred can follow his song. It begins nowhere in particular and can be broken off short or continued indefinitely _ad lib._; it is always in a minor key, and has falsetto subtleties in it that baffle our methods of notation. Written down, it seems to want form, but, to be fair, so do most rustic songs.

The talk is easier, for the peasant talks a good deal in a loud heavy voice. When his women folk walk with him, they follow respectfully an ordained number of paces behind, and he flings his conversation over his shoulder. A common gibe of Anglo-Indians is that the talk is always about two things,--money or food, and there is some truth in this. Sometimes women are the topic, but then the speech is not so loud, shoulder inclines to shoulder, and heads roll with chuckling laughter. In the talk of very poor people there is a curious habit of endless repet.i.tions. A company of old women will get through three miles in a discussion whether two or three annas were demanded by the dealer and whether one and a half anna was too much to pay. This, indeed, is rather too coherent and dramatic an example of a talk topic. I have often followed such a group, wondering when the over-chewed cud would be swallowed down in silence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OILMAN'S OX]

In Europe we speak of a monotonous life of labour as a mill-horse round, although the mill-horse has been dead for many years. Even the horse thres.h.i.+ng machine, which was so delightful to drive when I was a child, seems to be abolished in favour of one of the steam machines now "huzzin'

an' maazin' the blessed feealds wi' the Divil's oan team." But in India a phrase of this kind is quick and lively. The oilman's ox stands as the accepted type of a weary toiler. They say in pity of a man or woman overburdened with labour or domestic cares, "An oilman's ox!" An over-worked servant asks ironically, "What business has an oilman's ox to stand still?" The beast lives at home, and seldom goes abroad, but since he is condemned to a continuous pacing round the oil-mill they say: "The oilman's ox is always fifty miles from home." As an answer to casuistry and super-subtle argument, a popular phrase says, "My ox hasn't read logic,"

and comes from a conversation held between a learned Hindu logician and an oilman.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PERSIAN WHEEL]

"Why," asks the philosopher, "do you hang a bell on your bullock's neck?"