holding two pale yellow, heavily jeweled grandchildren of the raja returning from a drive. A bearer with a red umbrella ran after them, the elephants saluted with trunk and foot, and the sad-faced princelings disappeared in the palace.
The railway station was as deserted as the temple court in the late afternoon, and we had the table brought out to the platform and enjoyed tea in the open air. A white tramp, a pure specimen of the genus hobo, the only one of his kind encountered in India, appeared silently with: "You are a European like myself, lady. Please give me a few rupees to get to Tuticorin." David and Daniel came running in alarm, and hastily swept table, books, chairs, and ourselves inside the refreshment-room and banged the doors, and the beery beggar slunk away to the native bazaar. The butler was decorating his white dinner-cloth with interlacing arabesques of black seeds dropped from a funnel, after which he arranged finger-bowls filled with black-eyed marigolds among his traceries and stood off to admire the effect. Again and again we marveled that the Hindu, with his gross stupidities and incompetencies, had yet been able so thoroughly to master the intricacies of an English dinner, the decoration of the table, the procession of the courses, the ceremony and decorum of it all, with little of the incongruity and inequalities, the mixed splendor and shabbiness, that mark everything of the Hindu's own.
