The boys speak Santali like little natives, and even their English has an odd turn.

The inhabitants crowd around us, saying "Johar," which I take it is Santali for "Salaam," and we repeat "Johar" and grin broadly in reply; and the pie dogs sniff round us in a friendly way.

To be perfectly sure that neither language nor ideas should in any way be influenced by contact with a European mind he arranged for most of them to be written out in Santali, principally by a Christian convert named Sagram Murmu, at present living at Mohulpahari in the Santal Parganas.

Santali is an agglutinative language of great regularity and complexity but when the Santals come in contact with races speaking an Aryan language it is apt to become corrupted with foreign idioms.