ing to the station officers; and the small boy talked back to everybody, until he was suddenly lifted by the back, like a kitten, and handed through the window to "his fearful mother's" arms. "Because of his youth they will not arrest him," said the babu; and, from the shrieks that came from that compartment, there was no need for the law to add aught to the chastisement of the barefaced, nose-ringed mother.
We were in the heart of the tobacco country, and Trichinopoli in these modern days is as much a synonym for cheroots as Dindigal. Samuel Daniel, the local guide, who claimed us in the darkness of Trichinopoli station, had the advertisement of his own cigar factory on the back of his card, and everywhere we saw and smelled the local cheroot. We slept in the travelers' rooms in the Trichinopoli station, after dining at a table trailed over with bougainvillea vines and set with glasses of great double hibiscus. Trains rumbled by all night, the mosquitos sang a deafening chorus, and at sunrise we sped across another city of dirty white houses, whose inhabitants were just waking and scratching, and whose Brahman families were marking the door-sills and themselves for the day, the houses' toilet as necessary as their own.
The rock of Trichinopoli, exactly as it looked in old geography pictures, loomed ahead; and after a few turns in the narrow streets we came to the carved entrance of the staircase, tunneled up through the solid rock to temples on the side and summit. Two elephants went past on their way to the river
