glaring, sun-baked European suburb, where broad roads and waste spaces, new houses in large grounds, and dusty lines of banian-trees certainly did not go to make up the Benares of one's dreams. The hotel was more like the hotels of Java, the dining-room in a central building by itself, and long rows of bedrooms in adjacent buildings. Peddlers, guides, jugglers, and snake-charmers haunted the long, flagged porches all the afternoon. Cobras were drawn out from small, round baskets like so many yards of sausage, and made to dance on their tails to plaintive pipings, and then crowded back into their baskets with as little ceremony; and a weary little mongoose was shaken and cuffed and made to battle with the hooded horror.
Chaturgam Lal, in a flowered and cotton-wadded chintz overcoat, a worsted comforter around his neck, large spectacles under a fat turban, the caste-mark freshly painted on his brow, and an unctuous smile set for the day, rapped on our door long before dawn. We looked out to see a long line of sleeping bearers on the brick-floored portico, each before his master's door, every turban-topped bundle rolled in a stripped dhurrie with a pair of bare brown legs protruding. The air was keen and frosty, and I wondered if any estate on earth, any future reincarnation, could be more replete with bodily misery and discomfort than the regular life of an Indian bearer or traveling servant—sleeping on cold stone porches, snatching bits of food at irregular hours, traveling all day and all night, and as often standing for hours in the crowded compartments.
