Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/124

102 quarreling, and the corners of his mouth are permanently drawn down. A sad sobriety is his sense of dignity and good form. The hotel porter calls a "fitton" (phaëton), not with the tyrant voice of command, but with the sad, piercing wail of a banshee. The sais, wrapped in melancholy and a quilted bed-spread, responds with a mournful loon cry, and urges his lean, despondent horses forward, the running sais in tattered sheet hanging on behind, like an old dust-cloth, with bags of green fodder. He jeers but never laughs, and one wonders if he can, with so little room for a normal pair of lungs in that thin, flat body and narrow chest. With no oxygen to speak of for generations, they can hardly be cheerful or energetic. Athletic sports are not in the line of the young Bengalis of the Brahman castes who crowd the schools, take all the prizes, and fill the government offices,—Young Bengal being usually a superficially educated poll-parrot quite as offensive and hopeless as Young China. The Bengalis are slow to reward the Christian missionaries who have worked among them for a century, but they are converted to Mohammedanism in droves, Whole villages adopting that casteless creed.

The laboring Hindu seems generally incompetent, and sadly lacks inventiveness, originality, ingenuity, and the all-embracing but indescribable faculty known as "gumption." His appliances, tools, and instruments are unchanged since the day of Alexander, and the mechanical sense seems wholly denied him. Everything has come to him with his conquerors. With spindle legs, flat chest, and shrunken