in electroplated toast-racks and marmalade-stands. Our esthetic keeper of Chidambram put a great bouquet of yellow crysanthemums on the table, but the tablecloth was a thick honeycomb stuff, either a bed-spread or a bath-towel that some guest had left behind; and it was frescoed with hospitable records of a useful past in egg, coffee, and claret stains on a ground toned by the roadside's red dust of a season.
The local magistrate appeared for a morning call, entering the gates in a large bullock-bandy, or covered cart, drawn by two magnificent white bullocks with humps on their shoulders, the bells on their necks announcing the pace of their leisurely trot. The turbaned and white-draperied grandee had hardly descended from this seeming vehicle of state or chariot of religious ceremony when the driver loosened the yoke, tilted the bandy over, and turned the splendid creatures loose to graze on the lawn. This custom of southern India, of releasing bullocks and ponies of their harness at once, gives hotel and bangla grounds in the Madras Presidency always a homely look, suggestive alike of pasture, race-course, and stable-yard.
The magistrate was one of the finer types of high-caste Hindu, who added to his own Brahmanic culture and inherited refinement an English university education and acquaintance with other ways of living and thinking. He had all the Oriental suavity and graceful address, and talked with us two of the despised sex quite on a social equality. He sat long at his ease, commenting upon the customs of his people and the peculiarities of life and architecture in
